Articles on Green Party's Camejo & Sarah Lipson

The articles from the San Mateo County Times and from the San Francisco Examiner are below.

For the Sacramento Bee article entitled "Green Party is not exactly feeling blue", please see: http://www.sacbee.com/content/politics/story/5101885p-6108217c.html

For the Ukiah Daily Journal article entitled "Despite losses, Green Party candidates remain optimistic", please see: http://www.ukiahdailyjournal.com/Stories/0,1413,91%257E3089%257E976773,00.html

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http://www.sanmateocountytimes.com/Stories/0,1413,87%257E2425%257E975835,00.html

San Mateo County Times
Article Last Updated: Thursday, November 07, 2002 - 3:02:04 AM MST


Distaste for Gray results in good times for Greens


By Josh Richman
STAFF WRITER

Green gubernatorial candidate Peter Miguel Camejo of Walnut Creek made a historic showing in Tuesday's election, capturing 5.3 percent of the vote.

Those 345,777 votes are a milestone -- the 1998 Green gubernatorial candidate, former Democratic Rep. Dan Hamburg, got just 104,117 votes, or 1.3 percent -- but not a guarantee of future success, he acknowledged Wednesday.

"There's no question we have made some important headway here...but we also had the wind at our back because of the unpopularity of both major-party candidates," Camejo said. "There were one-time advantages we had this time that won't be there the next time around."

Bob Stern, president of the nonprofit, nonpartisan Center for Governmental Studies in Los Angeles, agreed: "I don't think this means the Green Party will be building on it -- I think they'll be very lucky in four years to do as well.

"This is an amazing showing, but on the other hand, the reason for the showing is people just didn't want to vote for Gray Davis," Stern said. "People (voting for Camejo) felt they weren't wasting their vote because they assumed Davis would win. If people had known there would be only a five-point difference (between Davis and Republican Bill Simon), there would've been fewer votes for the Green Party candidate."

Camejo said that's why Greens must strive to implement instant-runoff voting, in which voters rank candidates in order of choice. If nobody wins with a majority of first-choice votes, the last-place candidate is dropped and ballots are recounted with the dropped candidate's votes counted for their second choices. This prevents "taking a vote away" from a major party candidate but lets voters choose freely.

Such a system would've vastly increased his support this year, Camejo said: "Probably for every vote we got, there was one person who wanted to vote for us but voted for Davis to stop Simon."

Camejo said he believes progressive Democrats are willing to discuss carrying legislation for this new voting system.

Meanwhile, "the Green Party has to overcome structural difficulties," he said. "We've got to get a statewide office open with full-time staff, and we've got to increase funding. Those are issues I'm going to be working on during the next few years with the party's leadership."

Camejo's strongest support came from counties of Mendocino, where he earned 16.3 percent of the vote; San Francisco, 16 percent; Sonoma, 13.1 percent; Santa Cruz, 12.3 percent; Marin, 12.1 percent; Humboldt, 11.9 percent, and Alameda, 11.1 percent. He earned 6.3 percent of the vote in his home county of Contra Costa.

Camejo noted that he beat Simon in San Francisco by 0.8 percent, so when he reads Bay Area news media from now on, "I want to see the words 'third party' when talking about the Republicans."

Contact Josh Richman at jrichman [at] angnewspapers.com


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http://www.examiner.com/news/default.jsp?story=n.schoolboard.1107w

San Francisco Examiner

Publication date: 11/07/2002


School board seeing Green


BY NICK DRIVER
Of The Examiner Staff


Voters shifted the balance of power on the school board Tuesday, electing the first Green Party candidate for citywide office and cementing a powerful three-vote progressive bloc on the board.

Incumbent Dan Kelly was elected to a fourth term and Eddie Chin to a second. After running a well-organized grass-roots campaign, Green candidate Sarah Lipson scored the second-highest number of votes -- guaranteeing her one of three seats up for grabs -- with urgent calls for deeper reforms.

The former elementary schoolteacher and new mother joins fellow Green Mark Sanchez, who won as a Democrat before changing stripes, and Green-leaning Eric Mar on the seven-member board.

"This is a huge victory for teachers as well as for students," said Mar, pointing out that teachers now form a majority on the board.

After her January swearing in, Lipson will form the vital third vote of a cohesive, powerful voting bloc Mar believes should easily get a fourth swing vote on contentious issues such as an emphasis on testing results and recent bursts of campus violence.

Schools Superintendent Arlene Ackerman and the closely allied teachers union backed incumbent Danny Guillory, a small-business owner who raised the most money in an effort to become the first black person elected to the board in four years. Two other black candidates, Dr. James Calloway and Whitney Leigh, were defeated.

"The biggest thing we learned from this election is that we are a little bit polarized," conceded teachers union head Kent Mitchell. "This is not a hopeless situation."

"It is troubling," said Mar. "We need an African-American board member, especially in dealing with the divisive school diversity issue. The seven board members will have to work extra hard to represent the black community."

The progressives' first order of business: Elect one of their own as president.

"We will clearly see a new president and probably a new vice president," said Sanchez, founder of the progressive group Teachers4Change.

The Mar-Sanchez-Lipson bloc will also pressure The City to give as much as $50 million to schools, more than five times than the current funding. Most funding comes from the state.


E-mail: ndriver [at] examiner.com