Kay Lee, September 4, 1944 - November 2, 2015 (Eau Claire, Wis.)
VP candidate for Independent (2000)
Running mate with nominee: John Galt Jr. (Ronald E. Gascon) (b. 1959)
Popular vote: ? (0.00%)
Electoral vote: 0/538
The campaign:
Inspired by the character of John Galt from Ayn Rand's novel Atlas Shrugged, a candidate in Pennsylvania who dubbed himself John Galt Jr. made his second of six consecutive runs for the Presidency in 2000.
John Jr. wasn't entirely a chip off the old block. He did indeed hold strong libertarian views, but they fell along the lines of civil and social libertarianism-- particularly in the area of drug legalization. Unlike John Galt Sr., the junior Galt was anti-corporate and pro-environmentalism-- not exactly the laissez faire economic policy embraced by many libertarians.
I am not aware of who, if anyone, was Galt's running-mate in 1996. In 2000 it was Kay Lee of Eau Galie, Fla. who was known as Grandma Lee to her fellow social activists. She was an advocate for prison reform and legalization of marijuana.
On his website Galt described the obstacles he faced in the 2000 campaign:
When I first discovered the Internet in 1995, I thought now here is a platform for free speech, that will help me greatly when I run for president!
After a very brief time on compuserve, I found the aol kool-aid, they offered a platform to get my word out and their searchable profiles, made it really easy to discover peoples of the same thinking. I wrote and posted a speech I had given in Bellefonte Pa. and called it the dangers of marijuana! After reading an article about how the google search engine worked, I also started a link exchange and posted my writings as "Feel free to copy and distribute". By October of 1996, I had over 10,000 "friends" and the dangers of Marijuana was reposted on over a thousand sites, mostly those hosted by AOL. In Mid October, of 96 Aol shut down my website (Two weeks before the election)"because I was sending too many emails (Not a single complaint, but I was exceeding, some arbitrary amount of email). I threaten to sue, pointing out that they were interfering with a federal election. The site was restored after about eight days but obviously I lost the election.
In June of 1998, my Web site made #1 on the Hightimes 100 list. After the issue came out I was getting as any as 8000 hits per day. Aol contacted me and said what ever you are doing to promote this site cease and desist or they would close it down as my hits were slowing down the server. Again I threaten to sue, pointing out that they were interfering with a federal election. They backed down and I was definitely famous on the internet.
By October of 2000 my friends had grown to 80,000 Aol again shut me down, for sending too many emails, saying there was no possible way for 80,000 people to know me and or want email from me. We repeated the dance of threatening to sue and after a week or so the site was restored, but again I lost the election.
At this point I began to set up Mirror Free sites at places like geocities, hotmail and xoom.com all were quickly removed for violations of terms with out any notice...
Three days before the election, on Nov. 4, 2000, the Buck's County Observer outed John Galt Jr.'s real identity as Ron Gascon.
Apparently not registered as write-in candidates in any state, the number of votes received by the Galt/Lee ticket were not reported.
Election history: none
Other occupations: street theater, cartoonist, public access TV producer, caregiver, NORML activist, prison reform advocate, Universal Life minister, Americans for Safe Access coordinator in Wisconsin
Buried: ?
Notes:
Kay Lee was an admirer of Joan Bello, who wrote the book The Benefits of Marijuana. One of the illustrators for that book is Steve Willis. That is not me but when I initially saw his work in an underground newspaper we even had the same drawing style! As a fellow cartoonist I wrote to the other Steve Willis many years ago and discovered he was imprisoned on marijuana charges. Hi Steve, hope all is well with you today. Kay Lee herself had been a cartoonist in her younger days.
