Oh, c’mon, admit it…you just didn’t want to be a rotten egg, right?

Sorry to re-open an old thread, but I noticed that in comment 4, “Coming Back to the LP” said this:

That national LP membership graph is bogus…. I know from personal participation at the state and national level that the National LP membership was much higher than shown in the periods from 1980 – 1982, and from 1988 – 1994.

Actually, the graph isn’t bogus; it’s actually pretty accurate. I would prefer a *monthly* sampling of data points rather than an annual, becuase more data points would make clear a lot of things that aren’t clear with an annual sampling. Monthly sampling, and then a scan of the LNC’s decisions at each quarterly meeting, would probably be fairly revealing as far as a cause-and-effect pattern resulting from LNC actions.

I was working in the office when the LP peaked at over 12,000 members in 1992. I left in February 1993; my boss at the time, Nick Dunbar, left a couple of months later. Within a year after we left, the LP promptly lost about 4,000 members. I remember because I was reading the membership statistics that were posted to Joe Dehn’s “LPUS” message list (now defunct).

At the time, I was very upset that the work of three years of my life was being thrown down the toilet, for no other reason than subsequent staff at LPHQ simply failing to do the work necessary. It wasn’t just because of the normal fall-off between Presidential elections. Rather, it was because all of the practices that we had refined to maximize membership retention and assuring new prospect sign-ups were summarily discarded. Membership renewal letters that had been going out monthly, on autopilot, stopped going out. Information packets, in that pre-Internet era, which had been going out on the same day as the new prospects came in, stopped going out at all. I’d organized a weekly “volunteer night” while I was there, which was usually attended by a half-dozen people from the area, and got gobs of LPHQ work done — but after I left, it evaporated. And so on.

Things didn’t start picking up again until 1994.

Actually, these numbers, although they are wrong, are not surprising. During the era of Project Archimedes, the LP was in the hands of looters. The pay of the most notorious was based on membership growth. By restating, ie falsifying, the past history to show much lower membership numbers, the direct mail managers were able to skim off huge amounts of LP revenues. They were paid for increases in membership, so they reduced the previous years’ membership numbers in order to fatten their illgotten booty.

That isn’t true. Salary figures were decided upon in advance by the LNC. You can look at FEC records that show pretty consistent pay amounts (other than raises) of the individual you’re not naming, as well as everyone else in the office — and none of them were based on membership growth. There may have been bonuses awarded for good performance, but they were a small fraction of regular pay, and the standards were set high enough that it was fairly rare the staff got any.

I used to have records of the actual numbers at the time. But, as I recall, the LP paid membership in the early 80s after the Clark campaign exceeded 20,000.

It was well into the 20,000s in the early 90s.

Not in the early 90′s, no it didn’t. See above. It only went above 20,000 for the first time ever in 1996.

Marc Montoni,

You used to work in the LP national office in the early 90s. Don’t you have copies of any of the old State Chair reports showing the ACTUAL paid membership numbers?

They are still hanging out on the web somewhere, and in my paper files. But the numbers on the spreadsheet are accurate. The only times they are NOT accurate are during the Seehusen years. During that time, hundreds of duplicate records were created for members already on the database, and Seehusen consistently reported non-member subscribers as “members” in his reports to the LNC.

These incorrect practices were all duly reported to Seehusen. Seehusen refused to correct the situation; and his staffers repeatedly attacked those reporting the discrepancies. I don’t believe his numbers have ever been corrected, so in that sense, only for those years, yes, the numbers are “bogus”.

I’ve had all the coffee my bladder can hold. Got meth?

Yawn. You wanna get some coffee, Paulie?”

So Jim Davidson obvisouly believes that it is OK to spread lies about people and then run away after being called out for it. Spreading lies is the initiation of FRAUD and this is exactly what Jim Davidson has done.

Maybe they just got tired of this conversation? At the very least you should move it to a more current thread.”

Oh yes, they “got tired” of it after they spread lies and then they ran away after we refuted everything they said.

Yeah, that’s really a responsible, decent thing to do, spread lies about people and then run away because you are tired of talking about it.

“How about the ones about Angela and/or Tom running for President?”

Wow, just what the LP needs.

In my case, it’s because I posted the thread, so every time someone posts to it it pops up in my email.

Esp. since it’s really not all that related to the BTP…

Maybe casual observers. But not culpable ones.

You really think Dick Nixon “lost track” of those 18 minutes of Oval Office tape?

I don’t respect people who spread bullshit and then run away.

I don’t respect people who spread bullshit and then run away.

I don’t appreciate having my name dragged through the mud, and I also don’t appreciate having the name of one of my friends/co-workers/colleagues – Gary – dragged through the mud either.

Decent people retract and apologize after they bear false witness against thy neighbor.

DL/state ID only, no SS card, and they won’t let me vote without it, so I guess I won’t be voting, since they won’t renew my ID without an SS number.

They just have to be satisfied that they know who you are, and that you won’t vote twice. I’ll bet you’d be surprised: if you take ample documentation that proves you are who you are (but without state-issued ID), they might very well let you vote. Get creative.