The Nevada Democratic Party asked a Carson City court to invalidate the signatures gathered by the Green Party, which it argued do not meet the state's requirements.
The Nevada Democratic Party is seeking to invalidate the Green Party’s effort to land on the state’s November ballot, arguing it did not gather enough valid signatures to gain ballot access.
The Green Party has not been on a Nevada general election ballot since 2008, when its candidate received around 1,400 votes. Including a qualified minor party on the ballot — one potentially able to pull dissatisfied left-leaning voters away from the Democratic Party — could have major impacts on the presidential race in Nevada, where President Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump in 2020 by only about 33,000 votes out of more than a million cast.
The Green Party gathered nearly 30,000 petition signatures to land on the general election ballot, well more than the required amount of 10,095 signatures, which must be split evenly across Nevada’s four congressional districts. The party announced Monday that “as of this moment, the Nevada Green Party is on the Ballot.” The party has not submitted a candidate yet for the November ballot, but the party's former presidential candidate Jill Stein is running again this year. Stein called the lawsuit “outrageous” in a video posted to her campaign website.
Lawyers representing the Nevada Democratic Party filed public records requests to review the Green Party’s submitted signatures and petition, but the lawsuit said they had only received a handful of signatures and no copies of the petition.
“We have filed this challenge to preserve our rights to inspect the petitions consistent with Nevada state law,” Hilary Barrett, the executive director of the Nevada Democratic Party, said in a statement.
Call noted that the Democrats are suing the Nevada secretary of state, Democrat Francisco Aguilar, because his office provided “an incomplete file of our petitions,” which Call surmised would “be resolved simply by the Secretary of State providing them the complete file.”
Call clarified that the Green Party did not submit the required paperwork late. Instead, he wrote, “the Nevada Secretary of State processed it late and we have an affidavit to that effect.”
The Democratic Party campaign has mobilized vast resources, with millions of dollars and an army of lawyers deployed to block third-party challengers. Call said, “They are trying to bleed us out. A tactic of empire. I used the Wal-Mart analogy due to Wal-Mart’s strategy of putting its competitor out of business through overwhelming resources.”
Responding to the anti-democratic actions of the Democratic Party, Socialist Equality Party candidate for US president Joseph Kishore denounced “the efforts of the Democratic Party to keep Jill Stein off the ballot in Nevada. The SEP supports the right of all third-party candidates to get on the ballot.”
Kishore wrote that the Democrats’ efforts “to block candidates from obtaining ballot status is an attack on the most basic democratic right, the right to vote. The two parties of the capitalist ruling elite want to prevent workers and youth from having the ability to vote for anyone besides Biden and Trump.”
Stein is a Russian asset. While this set of actions may superficially seem a bit sketchy; this problem really shouldn’t need to be addressed in the first place.
I think any 3rd party that can be used by Russia and China to harm candidates for US office will receive funding, favorable news from state media, etc. from Russia and China whether those 3rd party candidates know it or not.
Never thought I'd live to see the day where I'd be accused of being a republican because I think we should follow the rules. I do think the democrats want to keep the Green Party off the ballot but I also question how they got 30,000 signatures for an election where they don't even have a candidate declared (it'll be Jill Stein, but still).
Like the Republicans have been financing top Democrats you mean right? As the biggest AIPAC donors are Republicans which have the Democratic party on their payroll.
Stein is a Russian asset so I for one fully support this move to block her. It's not even sly. They tried this shit in 2016 and it helped Trump so they're just running back that same plan.
I’ve seen this one before, when the Russians ran Nader to help Bush: /s
Nader, had already been subject to an extraordinary — and extraordinarily underreported — campaign of litigious harassment at the hands of the Democratic Party. John Kerry told Nader he had 2,000 lawyers at his disposal and would do “everything within the law” to win. In Arizona, Nader opponents filed a 650-page challenge to his attempt to get on the ballot, forgetting social justice concerns long enough to complain that one of Nader’s petition-circulators was a felon. They demanded ten samples of Nader’s own signature, hired a forensic examiner to call others into question, and challenged residents of a homeless shelter. The Democratic state chairman, Jim Pederson, said outright, “Our first objective is to keep [Nader] off the ballot,” because “we think it distorts the entire election.” source