Politicians in the nation's capital are courting the wrath of voters by refusing to budge on the debt-ceiling issue -- a stark example of the crying need to fix a long-broken system of entrenched interests and uncompromising elected officials.

So says Elliot Ackerman, an Iraq war veteran with a Silver Star who is leading a high-tech movement that he hopes will ultimately elect a centrist president unencumbered by the long reach of powerful money players.
Ackerman's group, a non-partisan, non-profit political startup called Americans Elect, on Thursday is expected to begin submitting 1.6 million signatures, a possible record, in all of California's 58 counties -- a significant step to gaining ballot access for a presidential ticket that voters would nominate through an online convention next June.

Americans Elect, already qualified for the ballot in eight states, is trying to get a ballot spot in all 50 states.
"What we're seeing in California is that folks really want more choice in politics, and they want to be more active participants," said Ackerman, 31, the chief operating officer of the group. His father, Peter Ackerman, an online food distributor, has, with the aid of 50 donors, loaned the organization $20 million.

"California just shows us what an appetite there is for this nationwide," Elliot Ackerman said. "So if we sound confident about ballot access, that's why, because we've already cleared the most difficult hurdle, which is California."


As the group lays the groundwork for landing a place on the ballot of every state, voters are already taking the first steps toward finding and nominating candidates.

Once registered as "delegates" on its website, https://secure.americanselect.org, voters are asked a series of "core" questions on political priorities to determine where they fall on the political spectrum. That will enable Americans Elect to get like-minded voters in touch with each other so they can eventually settle on a candidate aligned with their views.

Voters would be able to draft presidential candidates with the proviso that the candidate select a running mate who isn't from the same party.

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By next April, the field of candidates will be reduced to six after three rounds of online voting. The six will then name their running mates, who must come from the other party. An online convention, which Americans Elect officials say will be technologically secure, will be held in June to determine the national ticket.

On its website, voters are asked: "What if there were a better way to choose our president? Americans Elect is harnessing the power of the Internet to ask every single voter one simple question: Who would you nominate in 2012?"

The group's hope is that the nominee will take part in every presidential debate and challenge both Democrats and Republicans from the "radical center" with ideas on how to grapple with issues that seem so intractable: jobs, the national debt, Medicare and Social Security.

"We're trying to create more political space for better ideas," Ackerman said. "The two parties have been around for a long time without any major competition -- and the extreme stability of the parties is what's serving up unstable solutions."

The "American people are living in a very difficult political space now,'' he added. "People are hurting, and they're looking to elect leaders with solutions."

Is it doable? Could a nascent political group whose foundation lies in the frustration of disaffected voters really overcome the entrenched power and money of the two-party system?

Or is it, as one national writer put it, a techno-utopian fantasy?

Some political analysts are highly skeptical that an Americans Elect candidate could win.

"You can get on all 50 ballots and maybe you attract the right people to run, but if you don't have the money for organization, consulting, advertising and marketing, logistics, advance people, message strategists -- if you don't have that kind of infrastructure, it is very hard to compete and to be taken seriously," said Joe Tuman, a professor of political and legal communications at San Francisco State University.

"If you draft people with higher name recognition, that will help, but will they have the budget to compete?"
Even if a candidate emerges who is wealthy enough to self-fund a national campaign, he or she risks becoming a spoiler a la Ross Perot, who divided the conservative vote in 1992 and helped elect Democrat Bill Clinton, Tuman said.

"It's going to be difficult to unseat a century's domination by the two main parties," he said.