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Dems and Linked Officials Kick Green Party Off Presidential Ballots in Swing States, Sparking Concer
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The Supreme Courts of Wisconsin and Montana on Monday decided against the Green Party’s nominee Howie Hawkins’ presence on the ballot list for the November election. In both instances, court officials linked to the Democratic Party were responsible.
This coincided with Philadelphia’s Democrats currently being in a legal battle with the Greens to try and prevent Hawkins from appearing on the ballots there. This has even resulted in statewide mail-in voting being put on hold.
The simultaneous attempts to stop the Greens’ presidential campaign in different states have led many online users to speculate that this might be a coordinated effort. Those who support this theory called out the Democrats for supposedly “destroying any semblance of democracy” in the USA.
Three LIBERAL judges just joined with a Conservative judge to remove the Green Party ticket off Wisconsin’s ballot. But please tell me voting for Biden because of Supreme Court judges is going to help democracy. Democracy doesn’t exist in this country.
— Fiorella Isabel (@Fiorella_im) September 15, 2020 [twitter.com]
no one with a public platform dares say they support the greens or another third party, or even mention them, as they've been totally browbeaten into submission w/ the deranged jill stein hysteria. but that's not enough. they have to actually destroy any semblance of democracy
— ☀️👀 (@zei_squirrel) September 15, 2020 [twitter.com]
Progressive pundit Krystal Ball took a less dramatic stance, joking that the Democrats would win more elections if they fought for voters as hard as they are fighting the Green Party.
If only the Democratic Party would fight as hard to actually win voters as they are fighting to get the Green Party kicked off the ballot. https://t.co/ofAAQPNU4P [t.co]
— Krystal Ball (@krystalball) September 14, 2020 [twitter.com]
Supporters of the Democratic Party, on the other hand, rejoiced. Activist Ady Barkan even called [twitter.com] the Green’s exclusion “best news of the day, by a mile.”
In all three states, where the Green’s presence on the ballot was disputed, it has been done for varying but seemingly “technical [twitter.com]” reasons.
In Wisconsin, the state Supreme Court ruled [wicourts.gov] that the Green Party’s presidential ticket is ineligible to be on the ballot because of Hawkins’ running mate, Angela Walker. The courts says she’d broken the rules by writing in two different addresses when filing signature petitions.
The decision to exclude the Greens was made by a four-to-three majority. Of those four, three justices are considered ‘liberal’ as their campaigns have been funded by Democratic donors and even the party itself, according [ballotpedia.org] to Ballotpedia.
In Montana, a Supreme Court Associate Justice, appointed by former Democratic president Barack Obama, denied an emergency request to try and stop the Greens from being disqualified. This move effectively upheld an earlier judgment [courthousenews.com] to allow about 560 people to un-sign petitions that qualified the Green Party for the ballot, leaving them without enough signatures.
Pennsylvania’s mail-in election was put on hold due to the Democratic Party arguing in court that there were disqualifying irregularities in how the Greens filed their election paperwork.
As both the Green Party and the Democratic Party are usually considered ‘left-wing,’ the former is often thought to be taking votes away from the latter.
This may matter because, for example, in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania a few thousand votes could determine an election outcome. They are called ‘swing-states,’ important political battlegrounds that could easily go Democrat or Republican.
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