PRESS RELEASE: Billionaire investor Warren Buffett for President? Some Green Party voters say "Yes"!

For Immediate Release

Contact: Thomas Leavitt, co-founder, ISwitched.Org at 408-591-3342 or info@iswitched.org.

July 10th, 2003

SANTA CRUZ, CA - Should the Green Party nominate billionaire investor Warren Buffett for President? It's worth considering, say some participants in the ISwitched.Org Online Primary, citing the billionaire investor's strong and principled opposition to repeal of the estate tax and other elements of President Bush's $550 billion tax cut plan, his modest lifestyle and attacks on excessive executive compensation. Buffett's ability to self-finance a competitive campaign for President is also a factor, given that the Republican and Democratic nominees are each likely to raise and spend in excess of $100 million dollars in their quest for the Presidency.

A preliminary tally reveals several other nominations that may surprise those whose image of the Green Party is mostly white and male (and anti-business). These include African-Americans Earl G. Graves (CEO and publisher of Black Enterprise Magazine), Natalie Johnson-Lee (a Green Party Minneapolis City Councilwoman), and no less than four other women, including longtime environmental activist Lorna Salzman and Global Exchange founder/peace activist Medea Benjamin (a past Green Party candidate for U.S. Senate in California).

More "conventional" candidates include 1996 and 2000 Green Party nominee Ralph Nader (and his running mate Winona LaDuke, a Native American social justice activist), former Democratic Party Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney (who has been been the subject of a "Draft McKinney" movement within the Green Party since losing office last year), longtime Green Party activists David Cobb and Paul Glover (who have already indicated an interest in running to Green Party officials) and liberal Democratic Party candidates Dennis Kucinich and Howard Dean.

Several other candidates (including billionaire media mogul Ted Turner, talk show host Oprah Winfrey, TV actress Susan Sarandon, historian Howard Zinn and TV journalist Bill Moyers) are within reach of the minimum threshold for nomination - a final listing will be posted to the ISwitched.Org Online Primary web site at http://www.iswitched.org/dc03/dcballot.php Thursday evening.

"The diversity of candidates nominated demonstrates the benefits of opening up the process and letting people at the grassroots have a say in who should be considered for the presidential nomination of any party. It also demonstrates that the stereotypical image of the Green Party as exclusively white and male is at odds with the reality on the ground; 'diversity' has always been one of the 10 Key Values of the Green Party, and nothing demonstrates it better than the list of candidates selected in this preliminary tally," said ISwitched.Org co-founder Thomas Leavitt, who is administering the election from his home in Santa Cruz using servers hosted with local ISP Got.net.

Voting begins in the ISwitched.Org online primary at 8 a.m. Saturday the 12th of July, and the polls will remain open until midnight on Monday, July 21st, 2003, giving participants plenty of time to consider their options and activists plenty of time to rally support behind particular candidates. The ISwitched.Org Online Primary uses software designed to handle "ranked choice voting" (otherwise known as Instant Runoff Voting, a system recently adopted by the city of San Francisco and in long use internationally by countries such as Ireland and Australia) and thus will be able to produce a "majority" decision even with a diverse set of candidates, unlike MoveOn.Org's primary (which used a conventional single-choice "plurality" system that permits "victory" with support from less than a majority of the voters). For more information, visit the ISwitched.Org Online Primary web site at http://www.iswitched.org/dc03/

About ISwitched.Org

Launched in May of 2003, ISwitched.Org is dedicated to telling the stories of progressive Green activists at the grassroots of the party. It can be reached on the web at http://www.iswitched.org/. The site's co-creators can be reached via email at info@iswitched.org, or telephone at 408-591-3342. ISwitched.Org's look and feel was designed by Gunilla Leavitt, who is a freelance web designer (samples of her work can be found at http://www.godmoma.com) with over 250 sites to her credit. Submissions to the site are encouraged, and may be sent via email to profiles@iswitched.org for consideration by the editors.

About the ISwitched.Org Online Primary

The ISwitched.Org Primary has three goals: highlighting actual and potential Green Party presidential candidates that were excluded from the MoveOn.org "virtual primary"; allowing Green Party members and sympathizers to demonstrate early support for particular candidates; and demonstrating the use of Instant Runoff Voting, a system which allows voters to rank candidates in order of preference, thereby addressing major flaws in the "plurality" system used by MoveOn.org and in most American elections (such as the potential for a "split" in the "progressive" vote between Howard Dean and Dennis Kucinich highlighted in commentary on the MoveOn.org "primary").

A HTML version of this press release is available on the web at http://www.iswitched.org/pr-07-10-2003-primary-vote.html