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.
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/06/12/jxvj-j12.html
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.”