Yesterday, Americans Elect was out with a press release that included the following claim (emphasis mine):
Americans Elect delegates, which now total more than 400,000 and counting, can draft and support a presidential candidate of their choice and nominate a presidential ticket that will appear on general election ballots nationwide this November.
Is this true? Does Americans Elect really have more than 400,000 identity-verified delegates? What evidence there is suggests that it possibly is not even close to that number. As I learned a couple of weeks ago, when I went to AmericansElect.org and completed the delegate verification process, becoming an Americans Elect delegate requires a bit of a commitment. It’s not as simple as just “signing up.”
… There are four basic steps to becoming an identity-verified delegate of Americans Elect, all of which are to be completed via the verification interface
at AmericanElect.org. The first two of these steps — providing a genuine email address and choosing a “strong” PIN — echo the familiar registration process at many Web sites today, and would seem to correspond directly to the By -Laws’ definition of Members as “persons who…register online.” Indeed, after completing these first two steps, Americans Elect provided me with my own “account” and a user number — 369310 — which, you’ll notice, is very close to the “400,000” of the press release.
But in order to be eligible to provide clicks of “support” for draft or declared candidates; to draft candidates; and actually to vote for candidates one must become a delegate — which means completing the remaining two steps. These steps involve providing one’s full name, full residential address, date of birth, and last four digits of one’s Social Security number — then correctly answering several multiple-choice security questions that are generated by this information. Only then — when one’s “identity” has been “verified” — is one a delegate, with all the privileges that obtain.
Full Article: horizonr: Does Americans Elect Really Have 400,000+ Identity-Verified Delegates?.