According to Peninsula resident Judy Frankel – a Master Gardener, single mother and motivated citizen – it can and it must. Through inclusive, solution-driven discussion on her non-partisan political website, Writeindependent.org, Frankel hopes to encourage voters to speak up and take action towards reestablishing a representative government. She especially wants to engage those that, like her, have felt increasingly disenfranchised by the two-party system.
“Voters feel like they don’t really have choices and what ends up happening is people stop voting. They drop out,” says Frankel. “But I’m here to say, ‘Please vote.’ …I’m going to give you options that you didn’t even know you had.”
Except for in a few states, write-in candidates are an option in both congressional and presidential elections. Frankel is on a mission to inform voters of this possibility and help make it accessible to them. Two major initiatives of Writeindependent.org, which launched last September, are to educate Americans on the write-in voting process – how it works and who can do it – and to provide eligible citizens with the opportunity to run for public office. Frankel’s website not only details candidate requirements and election deadlines, but also gives potential write-in candidates the possibility of creating an online campaign platform.
“We need to finally level the playing field for candidates to make them all feel like they have a chance,” she says. “Not just the party leaders.”
Registered users on Writeindependent.org can endorse congressional and presidential write-in candidates in an innovative and interactive way. As Frankel explains, the site works as a sort of “Facebook of politics,” because of its strong social networking aspect. Candidates create biographical profiles and propose campaign-focused solutions to the nation’s problems, ranging from economic to environmental ones and beyond. Users can support a candidate by “liking” them. The more “likes” a candidate receives, the higher he or she is placed on the site’s list of candidates.
Frankel also serves as moderator in presidential debates between the various write-in candidates on Writeindependent.org, which she broadcasts on YouTube and links to her site. Frankel comes up with the debate questions based on a rigorous following of what’s currently going on in U.S. news and politics. She views the debates as an opportunity to educate people and stimulate the voting public’s collective investment in the future of our government.
“People are just getting what the TV tells them and a lot of times that’s just not enough,” explains Frankel. “When people start hearing the questions I’m asking, they’ll say, ‘Hey, I want to know the answer to that from Obama. I want to know the answer to that from Romney.’…They are not going to settle for the status quo questions from the [televised] debates, which are totally scripted.”
Frankel deeply values free speech, which she worries is slowly being eroded by the special interest groups taking over mass media. Part of the impetus behind creating Writeindependent.org was to create a place where people could openly discuss pressing national issues and brainstorm ways to address them without being “clouded by the agenda of the day.” In the website’s Ideas section, users can post complaints and propose solutions, as well as “like” solutions generated by other users or candidates.
The Ideas section of Writeindependent.org is loosely modeled after the Citizen’s Briefing Book introduced by President Obama in January 2009 as a means of collecting input from voters on changes they would like to see made. Frankel liked the idea, but feels it ultimately proved a false sense of empowerment since it didn’t produce any tangible results. She hopes a write-in candidate can pick up the Obama administration’s abandoned initiative of crowdsourcing solutions to our country’s problems.
“We have to reclaim our government and then…our ideas will actually be capable of being implemented,” says Frankel. “If we can’t elect a real president, then at least we can elect a congress we believe in through [the pledge for] Honest Candidates.”
Frankel’s Pledge for Honest Candidates is an agreement write-in candidates on Writeindependent.org must sign, curtailing the amount of campaign donations they can receive and committing them to returning voting districts to their original geographic boundaries. The pledge states that candidates cannot take any money or favors exceeding $1,000 per calendar year from any person or entity including PACs. It also stipulates that once a candidate is elected, he or she may not accept money or favors exceeding $100 per calendar year. The pledge also calls for the reversal of the redistricting instituted by the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 as a means of quashing the long-accepted practice of gerrymandering. In order to find the best candidates, Frankel believes money and gerrymandering need to be removed from the equation.
“[In] a really pro-Founding Fathers kind of democracy, where you have a representative government…[more than] just two parties are involved; everyone is involved,” she says. “Now, we have gerrymandered districts dictating the makeup of our congress and that’s really kind of scary because once the redistricting is done, according to who has the most money to get it done, we end up having our congress spot given to someone put in place with an agenda. …[It’s] incredibly bad for the democratic process.”
Frankel doesn’t want her Pledge for Honest Candidates to be reduced to an empty promise. She sees the reversal of redistricting and the reduction of exorbitant campaign spending as issues of great national importance that require swift and official action.
“It’s not enough just to have the pledge,” she says. “The pledge has to be able to walk right onto the floor of congress and become a bill. …All the people that [Writeindependent.org users] vote in who have committed to this pledge will also commit to taking it all the way into law.”
Frankel also hopes Writeindependent.org will engage younger voters in political discourse and educate them about how the voting process – and the U.S. government in general – works. She views the sense of apathy amongst some young voters as a result of the removal of civics lessons from schools. Herself a mother to an 11-year-old daughter, to whom the Writeindependent.org website is dedicated, Frankel has observed firsthand that civics is “just not being taught.” She sees this deficit as an urgent problem and believes that actor and advocate Richard Dreyfuss’ Dreyfuss Initiative to reintroduce civics lessons into required curriculum is “brilliant.”
“Our government needs more of the young people to understand the government and be participatory,” says Frankel. “It’s not just that [they] aren’t participating, they’re also putting it down. If you’re going to put something down, find out why it’s not working.”
As part of her effort to reach young voters, Frankel has donated forty-nine Writeindependent.org promotional buttons to Comedy Central’s political talk show satire, “The Colbert Report.” She enclosed a card requesting the buttons be included in host Stephen Colbert’s Super PAC Super Fun Packs – ostensibly instructional kits for college students on how to create a Super PAC, but actually just an elaborate jab at the independent committees permitted to raise and spend unlimited money to support or oppose political candidates. Frankel is hopeful that the buttons will generate a much-needed buzz. “Social networking is incredibly powerful,” she says.
Frankel is a firm believer in cooperative solutions. A Master Gardener in both California and Massachusetts, she grows over 185 varieties of fruit, vegetables and herbs on her little Palos Verdes farmette. Despite her full-time commitment to Writeindependent.org, she also manages to squeeze in work as an organic farmer.
“I still prune peach and nectarine trees for people. …And I teach people how to grow food,” says Frankel. “To get back to having a healthy planet, healthy people and not-so-high healthcare costs, we have to take care of the planet first. …I think we’re starting to see that if we don’t love each other and cooperate, we’re going to lose everything we have.”
Frankel isn’t one to shy away from a challenge. Although she estimates she needs to raise around $5 million to sustain, promote and expand Writeindependent.org, Frankel has an unwavering belief in her ability to succeed. It’s a belief she wants to share with and instill in others.
“You know that [Dr. Seuss] story ‘Horton Hears a Who!’? I really feel like every person in this country is like that last guy who says ‘Yawp!’,” Frankel says, referring to the little Who whose voice serves as the necessary final addition to the chorus of Who voices crying out to be heard by the other animals in the jungle. “You have to believe in yourself enough to believe that your vote matters,” she continues. “We have to make history. There’s no other way around it.”
For more information go to Writeindependent.org or visit their facebook page.
