top of page

And the Meek Shall Inherit the Earth

Power to the People - Lawn Sign.png

Dear District 4 Resident. My core mission is about structurally changing the way we do local government in Santa Cruz so that key (viral) decisions affecting District 4 are placed directly into resident hands, not into the hands of politicians (political parties) and special interest group "clingers" who have different agendas and different priorities than yours--priorities that inject negative byproducts into your neighborhoods and into your lives. In essence, you each will be granted a key to city hall without political "interference" circumventing your choices. This is known as "a transfer of power" as we transition into a Direct Democracy. By 2025, our district will have the world's first, software-based, policy-making platform piggybacking onto existing city government to capture your direct voices--

from straw polling at the district or neighborhood levels to shaping and channeling resident opinions into concrete policy proposals.  This will be the first-of-its-kind, "e-democracy" platform in the United States. You will squarely be in the driver's seat of community decision-making along with your neighbors who share mutual goals and get involved only when a particular issue is meaningful to you. The time is now for us to harness and exploit the unlimited potential of  mobile, communication and data security technologies to make democracy more real-time, dynamic, accessible, engaging, convenient, participatory and, above all, equal--a virtual space where the CEO and the ditch digger become indistinguishable from one another. Please vote on November 8th. Warmest regards. Greg Hyver

black and white banner.png
Election Results - November 8, 2022 - Santa Cruz City Council District 4
Election Results - Nov-2022.png

With a complex and interconnected triad of central campaign messages, direct Democracy (Power to the People), Semi-Autonomy (District-Level Referendums), and Individualism (Traditional Liberalism), at the heart of our platform, it was predictable that the outcome wouldn't be stellar for our candidate--a fresh face on the political scene. We understood this going into the campaign season and set our target goal to take home 10% of the popular vote in this single-party (Democrat) enclave on the Northern California coast. When all was said and done, our candidate had captured 7% of the vote--dismal from a political point of view, yet still a viable start to our fledgling movement. With the rising specter of a growing collectivism pulsating across the world, spurred on through our digitization (Big Tech) and manipulation (Government), there is no greater need than now for the people to take back the power that was once theirs and to call out and punish the elite class for misusing technology (e.g. AI) against the people via an authoritarian-inspired, Big Government-Big Tech collusion.

Regardless of our less-than-remarkable performance at the polls, we learned several important lessons that should, indeed, help our newly-born political movement to make greater gains in future elections. 


1) The Inability to Drive Our Narrative - while our platform was built around the idea of changing the way we do local government, both the voters and the media were focused on several local ballot measures, which drove attention away from our broader message. In a single-party county and city, the party dictates those narratives, often less game-changing messages (e.g. Measure O) that they hype up, while they limit exposure to their grander strategy objectives that will have the greater impacts on the local community, often by using innocuous and unassailable phrases (e.g. "affordable housing") to deter challengers and debate. Delivering our narrative to a larger segment of voters will require something more eye-catching than a website or lawn sign. It will take a more hands-on approach.

2)
Political endorsements rule the day - while we played the role of the antagonist throughout the campaign by challenging the establishment and the status quo, candidates like Scott Newsome, the eventual winner of the seat, quickly aligned himself with the political machine to win the endorsements of the major political players in the city.

3)
Lack of Technology Demo - we felt that our inability to produce a direct democracy simulation and demo for voter interaction that allowed them to recognize to power of our technology vision never allowed us to properly convey its principle aspects and powerful features. We will be reaching out to the Swedish, Direct Democracy political party know as Direktdemokraterna in hopes of leveraging its internet platform (Demo mode, English language) to give the residents of Santa Cruz the opportunity to engage in a Direct Democracy simulation environment. Our hope is to have this to share and utilize during the 2024 campaign season and much of our success at the polls will depend on it.

4) Signage VENUES - we were only able to effectively post one of our two 4' x 6' Direct Democacy signs on a major traffic artery. Signs of this size are only allowed to be posted on private property and we were unable to find a willing participate to place our second sign at a high-traffic location. This was more than likely due the lack of name recognition of our candidate as well as the promotion of a direct democracy that, to many, remained too foreign a concept, making the property owners we solicited overly cautious and to avoid participating. These venue sites need to be cultivated much earlier in the campaign.

5) financial resources - our budget only allowed us to support a single post-card mailer delivered a week before the mail-in ballots arrived. Better-funded campaigns often delivered post-cards at two separate times: (a) just before mail-in ballots arrive and (b) just before the election. Yet, we did not feel that financial limitations were a critical factor in our candidate's loss, but were the first three lessons list above.

black and white banner.png
Short-Term Policy Positions - Debunking the Affordable Housing Myth
pandora's box.png

The District Charter - My Five Policy-Making Criteria (VIDEO; 4:42)

What Sets Me Apart As A Candidate & Single Most Important Policy Issue Opinion Piece (
PDF)


Unleashing Pandora's Box  - Affordable Housing Position Paper (Highlights PDF) (Full Report (TBD)

Measures N (Empty Homes), O (Library/Parking/Market) & P (TOT short-term rentals) Positions (PDF)

Policy Positions
 

black and white banner.png
Long-Term Solution (Core Mission) - Empowering the Individual Voice

THE DIRECT DEMOCRACY EXPERIMENT
Power to the People
"Where every voice is left empowered ... and no voice is left unheard"

welcome to the
Think Different Campaign
Santa Cruz district 4 style

[ fasten your seat belts ]

Apple Think Different Commercial Screen.png
How do you think.png

Are you a district 4 voter?
Use this search tool to find your santa cruz voting district

Donate to our campaign - Hyver for City Council 2022
We're in dire need to mail out a 2nd voter postcard before the Nov. 8th election

In Memoriam - this campaign is dedicated to my father, Dr. Gregory August Hyver Sr, who passed away on January 7, 2022 ...

... Kudos to my mother for always believing in me and to my family for always encouraging me

... and special thanks to the late, great steve jobs, whose marketing campaigns we reference throughout our material!

in the news.png
good times icon.png
Lookout Santa Cruz Logo.png
Santa Cruz Sentinel Logo.png
city on the hill (ucsc) press icon.png
Lookout Icon - Oct-20-2022.png
Lookout Forum Icon.png
santa cruz local logo.png
black and white banner.png
sign of the times icon.jpg
IMG_1015.JPG
IMG_1019.JPG

All videos shown on this election site can be found on our YouTube channel (set YouTube player to auto-play to watch video sequence).

Please share this website with family, friends and neighbors!

black and white banner.png
Government is the problem not the solution.png
report card - titled.png
Like Talking to a Brick Wall.png

[ THE 1-2 PUNCH ... we'll leverage technology to deploy these two solutions ]

#1 - DIRECT DEMOCRACY

democracy at your fingertips - artistic.png
screaming woman to man.png

#2 - SEMI-AUTONOMY

insurance policy.png
city of santa cruz - intro to three examples of semi-autonomy.png
Semi-Autonomy Direct Democracy Meanings.png
Like Talking Through an Open Door.png

times: 2:24 mins, 3:16 mins
[ all campaign videos can be found on our YouTube channel ]

Official Campaign Video Icon.png
The Two Components Title Screen with Click to Play.png

[ click chart to enlarge chart ]
The software (DDESPE) will be configurable to three different modes:
1) enhanced representative democracy (traditional) with resident opinion polling and viral policy capture
2) direct democracy policy paths
3) direct democracy and semi-autonomous policy paths

piggyback block diagram.png

THE CANDIDATE

Greg's Bio.png

Campaign Statement

Greg Hyver for Santa Cruz City Council, District 4

August 10, 2022
 

“The States Members of the United Nations shall uphold the principle

of self-determination of all peoples and nations.”
 

UN General Assembly
The right of peoples and nations to self-determination
Charter of the United Nations, Article 1
16 December 1952

Power of Choice Icon.png

The Nonpartisan Movement [the movement of the powerless] is a small, Santa Cruz-based watchdog group and think tank with a mission to save Liberalism, an ideology founded on Individualism that has been under siege and distorted for decades. We believe that the Santa Cruz Liberal community has lost its compass in regards to the ultimate purpose of Liberalism: to protect individual rights and freedom of choice from government intrusions. On a daily basis, we hand over more power of choice (autonomy) to an over-reaching government to make our choices for us in the name of the Public Good (Collectivism), an idealistic concept that has been grossly compromised, rigged and missteered by rampant, special interest group favoritism and quid pro quo's. Individualism (Liberalism) and Collectivism (Government) are the antitheses of one another and in constant tug-of-war over the power of choice. Political parties (Government) are NOT the guardians of Liberalism, by definition (and despite the masquerade), but her antagonists, so the concept that an ever-expanding Big Government can somehow co-exist with a thriving Liberalism is sheer fallacy and contradiction. More rightly, it's a zero-sum end game--one wins, one loses. Therefore, in order to have their cake and eat it too, Big government protaganists gradually convoluted the definition of Liberalism so the two became almost synonymous--while no one seemed to notice, or care, that Liberalism was being hijacked by her greatest adversary. Sadly, our education system fails to point this out.

 

Apple Computer's famous 1984 Superbowl Commercial introducing the Macintosh probably best exemplifies the Nonpartisan Movement. But, instead of trying to sell more Macintosh's, we are sounding the alarm of the authoritarian direction that American society is quickly heading through our digitization (if we are not already there) and challenging  Santa Cruz residents to launch that giant sledgehammer (referenced in the commercial) into their television screens (metaphorically-speaking, of course ... although the suggestion does have its merits) in order to save Liberalism and, along with it, the freedom to set their own paths to self-determination. Yet, in place of a sledgehammer, we are proposing a more concrete solution to government's growing encroachments in pursuit of restoring greater "power to the people"—a paradigm shift in local government to re-balance the power scale that has long been tilting in government’s favor since the 1960’s. Under the mandate of District 4 voters, we shall take this important first step together by declaring our district a semi-autonomous  Direct Democracy.


A government "by the people" is designed for adaptability and not for stagnancy. With a stroke of a pen, the City of Santa Cruz changed its governing structure and City Charter by forming six new districts in 2022. By deploying advanced communication and information technologies as well as by leveraging the proliferation of low-cost desktops, laptops and mobile devices (95% of all households in the City of Santa Cruz have a "computer") according to US Census data), the precursors for a Direct Democracy Renaissance, the time is ripe for District 4 to take on not just a local leadership position, but state and national ones as well, by exercising and enhancing this new form of local governance. But, the choice is yours: politics as usual, with its unending list of policy failures, band-aid "solutions" that focus on the symptoms, not the disease (often introducing new, detrimental byproducts into the community), demands for greater sacrifices from the taxpayer, property and business owner, crime victim, renter, parent and employee and, of course, the prioritization of party and special interest voices over resident voices in the policy-making process, or usher in a fundamental change and a new vision for how we govern over ourselves and set our own course in an effort to revive Liberalism so she can flourish again? It will take effort on our part, but it's time to take back our community and our freedom to choose what's best for it. It's time to walk away from our old allegiances and our old ways of thinking. Above all, it's time to Think Different.

 

Carpe  Diem ...

... and Happy Halloween, everyone!

Download the white paper (1-page PDF): "On Resurrecting Liberalism and Individualism"

black and white banner.png

ACCESS THE COMPLETE CAMPAIGN SITE HERE

Thank you for considering me on November 8th, 2022. 

Greg Hyver

Nonpartisan

the direct democracy candidate

santa cruz, CA

district 4

 

Paid for by Hyver for City Council 2022

FPPC #1450065

  • LinkedIn
  • YouTube

CAMPAIGN SYNOPSIS PAGE
This web page will dramatically change the way you think about local government

THE PROBLEM

multiple-rodin the thinker.png
multiple-rodin the thinker.png

WHAT CAUSES THE PROBLEM?

ADDRESSING THE PROBLEM

BENEFITS OF THE 1-2 PUNCH

sunny background banner.png

WATCH TWO GOLD STAR VIDEOS

FITTING THE PIECES TOGETHER

CAMPAIGN STATEMENT & WHITE PAPER

halloween banner.png
greg hyver - with video info - full name.png
multiple-rodin the thinker.png
bottom of page