What a great year for Peace and Freedom Party! In 2018, PFP candidates ran a unified campaign designed to get the votes we needed to maintain our ballot status for another four years and to show voters how a socialist economic system would improve their lives. We accomplished both goals.

This was not just a campaign for an individual, but rather one for Peace and Freedom Party. Of course, the candidates raised issues related to the offices that they were running for that neither the Democrats nor Republicans would. For example, our candidate for State Treasurer pushed for a California state bank, our State Controller candidate talked about taxing the rich, and our candidate for Insurance Commissioner spoke about eliminating health insurance by promoting a universal single-payer healthcare system.

As a candidate for Secretary of State, the chief elections official, I dealt with election reforms issues such as replacing Top Two elections with proportional representation; getting the corrupting influence of big money out of our elections by allowing equal public funding of all ballot-qualified candidates; and having secure and transparent elections with publicly owned, open-source paper ballot voting systems.  Each candidate pushed not only their own campaign but the other candidates as well.

I started my quest early by gathering signatures in lieu of filing fees: This turned out to be more difficult than most politicians say. Had I hired signature gatherers, it would have cost more than just paying the filing fees! Fortunately, volunteers were able to gather from over 40 counties more than 2,100 valid signatures of the 7,000 required to totally pay the filing fee.

It was the first time that proportional representation was explained in easy-to-understand language and sent to all 17 million-plus California voters. We also printed and distributed thousands of palm cards explaining proportional representation (and the ease of using it) and asking people to vote for our entire slate. I was surprised at the number of activists who said that they had heard of proportional representation but never really understood it until they read my palm cards. However, my most positive responses came from my statement distributed to the activists at the Poor People’s Campaign. One activist told me that she had re-registered back into Peace and Freedom Party as a result of my campaign.

One of the more interesting nights of the campaign was when I was invited to speak to a tango dance event. To my surprise, I was interrupted several times by applause and a college professor of communications told some people that my talk was very persuasive. 

– written by C.T. Weber