“The hardest thing I’ve ever seen the Democrats fight for is to keep a disabled Marine combat veteran off the ballot.”

– Matthew Hoh, Green Party candidate for U.S. Senator in North Carolina

The last week of June 2022 brought more strikes against an American democracy already in deep crisis. Democrats blocked access to the ballot for the Green Party of North Carolina and seven independent gubernatorial tickets in New York.

Briahna Joy Gray hosts Matthew Hoh and Jill Stein to talk about the North Carolina Green Party’s fight with the Democratic Party and Democratic-controlled North Carolina State Board of Elections over the board’s denial of ballot access to the Greens.

North Carolina Senate candidate Matthew Hoh is enduring an all out attack from the Democratic Party to get him off the ballot. Why? Because he's running as a Green Party candidate. He got more than enough signatures, but the state won't certify them. 

Raleigh, NC – On Wednesday, Green Party Senate candidate Matthew Hoh and fellow plaintiffs filed a lawsuit against the North Carolina State Board of Elections, which denied the North Carolina Green Party's petition for ballot access in a 3-2 vote. The NCGP submitted 2,000-plus verified signatures more than required by law, and the denial of this legitimate petition left the campaign and supporters stunned and outraged.

The complaint was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina by lead attorney Oliver Hall of the Center for Competitive Democracy, with other plaintiffs including the NC Green Party and Matthew Hoh campaign supporters who circulated or signed the petition.

• Political analysts expect more of these sorts of challenges aimed at keeping third parties off ballots — especially in places where the races are tight.

Democratic Party activists fretting about potential Republican strength in North Carolina, a state considered to be leaning red for the midterm elections, are mounting an aggressive campaign to keep the left-leaning Green Party off the ballot there to avoid diluting Democratic turnout.

The Green Party’s recent problems gaining access to North Carolina’s election ballot raise concerns from another political group that has had to work to win a ballot spot.

Brian Irving, executive director of the North Carolina Libertarian Party, told Carolina Journal that the eight times his party turned in petitions for certification, they never saw the level of scrutiny by the State Board of Elections that the Green Party received in its recent failed certification effort. Irving, who has helped lead NCLP for three decades, said that typically, the state board would accept signatures verified by county elections boards as valid and wouldn’t refuse to certify based on unproven questions about those signatures. 

The NY Board of Elections has ruled that petitions filed by all of the minor political parties to get candidates on the ballot in November were invalid and failed to meet the very high threshhold of 45,000 valid sigatures statewide.

Howie Hawkins, the Green Party candidate for Governor and former Green Party candidate for President; Larry Sharpe, the Libertarian Party for Governor and former Libertarian Party candidate for vice-president; and Harry Wilson, who recently lost the republican primary for Governor, was placed on the ballot by the UniteNY party. It is unclear whether Wilson would have accepted the UniteNY party line, but the point was moot as Unite joined with the Green, Libertarian, Freedom, and New Visions candidates in being denied ballot access this year.

• "It's a slap in the face to the thousands of people who signed," said Matthew Hoh, the Green Party's presumptive U.S. Senate nominee.

The North Carolina Green Party's presumptive U.S. Senate nominee accused the state's Democratically-controlled Board of Elections of "a corrupt, lawless, and blatantly partisan attack on democracy" after it voted Thursday against certifying Green Party's petition for its candidates to appear on the November ballot.

• The last time democracy nearly died all over the world, and almost all at once, Americans argued about it, and then they tried to fix it

If the Republican and Democratic Parties are virtually identical on most issues involving big money, like the military, banking, corporations, and so on, you don't have a democracy. Democracy implies choice among many alternatives. We have virtually no alternatives. Hence this video by Briahna Joy Gray, which spells out a "Dem-Exit" in progress, as many Democrats wake up to the fact that the party almost never keeps its promises and is mainly engaged in raising money for itself and maintaining its increasingly tenuous grip on power.

The North Carolina Green Party had its petition to be recognized as an official party in state elections denied, in a 3-2 party-line vote, at the N.C. State Board of Elections on June 30. But the NCGP is crying foul, alleging the Elias Law Group — a powerful firm used by national Democrats, which was also successful in getting North Carolina’s election maps thrown out — used lying, bullying, and harassment to influence the decision.matt

The Green Party of New York gubernatorial ticket expressed its outrage today at the ballot access process for independent candidates for Governor and Lt. Governor in New York.

On Monday, June 27, the state Board of Elections ruled as invalid the independent nominating petitions of the Green Party and all four other gubernatorial candidates who are not already on the ballot as the Democratic and Republican candidates on the grounds of insufficient signatures. The other petitions were for the Libertarian, Unite, Freedom, and New Visions candidates.