The founder of the Missouri Hemp Network, Steven Wilson, has to decided to explore the possibility of a Presidential campaign in 2016.
Wilson stated a few reasons why he is thinking of running for President: “The choices the American voter has right now are so divisive that logic and reason can’t survive. I also have been waiting for a candidate to appear who cares for the American working man and those less fortunate within our own society. As we are now in a political time of perpetual campaigning year after year I decided that waiting was a waste of time.”
Wilson founded the Missouri Hemp Network in 2010 as a consumer based education network to aid Missourians in comprehending the final products from cultivating Industrial Hemp. He began this work originally in 1995 in Tennessee.
Wilson is no stranger to politics. He has worked with state politicians in data mining and drafting bills for industrial Hemp. Wilson has also been a candidate twice here in Missouri running under the Libertarian party banner.
Asked why he is contemplating a national Write-in campaign, he said: “James Madison was right about factionalism in America. The major two parties are perfect examples of what he warned us about, and more closely to myself, the LP of today is not the LP of 1996. The people have changed as well as the founding principles of the LP which made it attractive and worthwhile. I started out as a Green Party member (Green Road) because of Industrial Hemp and middle class quality of life, but found the LP to be more aggressive about individual sovereignty. But that LP is gone now. And finally, a Write-in campaign is labor intensive. The voter cannot just check a symbol and run. The voter will investigate and discuss and physically write down their chosen leadership. Write-In campaigns force voters to be accountable and informed.”
Wilson is not running a single issue campaign. He is working on a much broader canvas which includes reform for Cannabis, Medicaid, taxation, Military, Prison, education, Electoral, Judicial, and trade.
To find out more about Steven Wilson and his exploratory matters please go to
www.StevenWilson2016.weebly.com
Ah…hadn’t thought of that angle. Good one!
It wasn’t a typo: it was a word play. Barry Sanders retired just before passing Walter Payton as the all-time leading rusher in the NFL. Over time he has given vague answers as to why he retired at that moment.
I make the comparison because I can’t decide if Sanders has the stamina to finish the race. I don’t know if he is running for President or running against the Democrat establishment candidate. To me, those are two separate things. His motives are not exact to me.
I respect him either way.
Good point. But that’s just one of the issues.
Another is that many precincts, counties and states just don’t count write-in votes. Or they do count them, but fail to report the totals. Or report them, but much later, after people have already gotten their election result news – so the best you get out of it is a footnote in history books, if that.
My point exactly. Always a danger for a write-in candidate. Steven could be spelled Stephen and Wilson can have two l’s. Stickers are good where permitted but there are many ways a canvassing board can disqualify a write-in vote.
LOL, just noticed that. I assume it’s a typo.
Barry Sanders was a running back. I think he meant Bernie. Not very encouraging for a write-in candidate!
Sanders has already ruled out running as anything other than a Democrat. Good luck, with the previous caveats.
There are many ways to run a campaign for President. I chose a Write-in after careful consideration.
1. It is labor centric in that the voter will have to know me as to vote for me
2. It will force the voter to see the Party vs Candidate paradigm (Am I voting for an abstraction or a real person)
3. Indirectly, it will allow the voter to learn about the ballot access laws in their own state
4. It will also allow them to learn the irony of letting states decide ballot access while letting the Federal government decide Debate access
Also, because of my disagreements with many LP decisions over the past few years I would be a hypocrite if I ran for the LP nomination.
Jill Stein is improving her skill set as a national candidate with every campaign. But there is no viable game set wherein I could engage Barry Sanders if he ran for the Green Party nomination. The people that I still know within the party have told me there are many willing to just “hand him” the ticket.
I have no expectations. If the American people want to improve their lives then they will have to do the work. I am not a moralist nor a disciple.
Getting your name to be known by more than a trivial number of voters would cost a lot more than 150k, and if you actually raise 150k you could get a fair bit of ballot access which just by itself would lead to more people looking up info about you than 150k could buy you. Then there are all sorts of issues with getting your vote totals reported, especially in any kind of timely manner. I guess you’ll find out if you make it that far. Good luck!
I spent several weeks speaking with Election Divisions from each state. I found a few that stated that a Write-in for President was the domain of the FEC. The stupidity was frightening. I had many drinks during those moments of despair.
Prior to this move I had to choose two possible systematic forms: one symbolic in nature and the other legitimate per Electoral College.
Several states require notarized documents from my VP candidate and the electors per state. This is why I chose a bottom to Top structure for the campaign. A General with no soldiers is not a General. A write-in campaign can only work if it is done at the mega grassroots level.
Some states have no procedure at all. The voter simply must write down my name and it must be somewhat legible. Another frightening rule.
Even though I broke down the cost of a campaign of this nature per winning vote totals per 2012 I had to be realistic about the actual amount of donations. Even with my own contacts doing the media buy-ins; if I don’t get $150,000 by November it is either nothing or a symbolic gesture. Anything under that amount and I won’t be able to buy media in October of 2016 in enough states to total 270. If voters don’t know my name, then I am not running for President; no matter the ballot access means.
For those who have reached out so far and volunteered or donated I am grateful.
Peace in 2016 and beyond.
The others just don’t allow them in presidential elections, I imagine because of the complication of it technically being an election for slates of electors. I had somebody get irrationally angry at me the other day when I tried to explain that the lack of any such slate of electors, was why the state didn’t count his write-in vote for Colin Powell. Though as Richard notes most states do have a procedure for handling that if write-ins submit a slate of electors, so it isn’t really much of a justification for not allowing presidential write-ins at all.
It will be kind of interesting to see him try write-in-only, but I don’t see that it will really tell us much new. Rocky Anderson had write-in status in a lot of states, it’s pretty normal for most third-party candidates to get write-in status in some or a lot of the states they failed to get regular ballot access in. No matter how well he campaigns, he’s going to face the reality of being a write-in candidate with zero name ID, which means if he’s lucky he might get a triple-digit vote total.
Even if you’re going to run a write-in focused campaign, I don’t see the point in not getting on the ballot in the two or three states where it is trivially easy to do so.
Cali still allows write-ins for President. I believe there are other states that don’t allow write-ins other than OK though.
“Thomas L. Knapp
August 24, 2015 at 8:52 pm
Richard,
If you check out his campaign web site, he has a detailed state-by-state requirements list for write-in candidates, including the fact that nine states don’t allow them.”
I thought that there were only two states that did not allow write in candidates, Oklahoma and California (after the passage of Top Two Primary).
Jed–
I was thinking the same thing!! He’s got great burnsides, so he could be the candidate of 1816 instead of 2016.
Richard,
If you check out his campaign web site, he has a detailed state-by-state requirements list for write-in candidates, including the fact that nine states don’t allow them.
I’m not saying his plan can work, of course. But it’s not just some seat-of-the-pants assumption collection either.
He looks presidential. Guy’s a dead ringer for Martin Van Buren.
I wonder if he realizes that in almost all states that canvass write-ins, he will need to submit a slate of presidential elector candidates. In California he will need 55 and each candidate needs a notarized declaration of candidacy.
Glad to see Steven testing the waters! A well-planned and competently-executed national write-in campaign looks like an interesting experiment, too.