‘They’ll do whatever they can to keep us off.’ NC Green Party faces pushback in ballot bid
With a Friday deadline to get its candidates on the ballot, the North Carolina Green Party is now facing another obstacle on top of a string of setbacks: the Democratic Party.
The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee confirmed to The News & Observer that it has begun contacting voters who signed a petition for the Green Party — a progressive third party that has never won a major election in North Carolina — to gain ballot access and asking them to retract their signatures.
“Since the North Carolina Green Party hired a petition gathering firm with a documented record of committing fraud, we’re reaching out to voters to ensure they have not been deceived,” Amanda Sherman Baity, a spokesperson for the DSCC, said via email.
The firm Baity refers to is First Choice Contracting, which the N.C. Green Party briefly worked with early in its campaign to access the ballot. The owner of First Choice Contracting, Shawn Wilmoth — who pleaded guilty to election fraud in 2011 in Virginia, TV stations WFLA and WXYZ reported — now is involved in a scandal over allegations of election fraud in Michigan, WXYZ reported.
According to a report this year from the Michigan Bureau of Elections, thousands of fraudulent signatures in the Michigan governor’s race resulted in the bureau’s recommendation that five out of 10 GOP candidates be disqualified from the race.
N.C. Green Party leaders said they were approached by First Choice in December 2021 and were unaware of any past fraud. After two months of petitioning, First Choice had only turned in 109 signatures, said N.C. Green Party Secretary Michael Trudeau — half of which the party later deemed to be unusable. Shortly after, the party voided its contract with First Choice and received a refund for its payment, campaign finance records show.
“The ironic thing here is the insinuation that this so-called fraudulent firm collected all these signatures for us and in reality, the reason why we severed the contract with them is because they didn’t turn in any,” Trudeau said.
The report in Michigan was not made public until May 2022 — several months after the N.C. Green Party voided its contract with the firm.
Texting, calling Green Party supporters
The N.C. State Board of Elections meets Thursday to decide whether to certify the Green Party for the ballot.
On Saturday, Matthew Hoh, the party’s presumptive nominee for U.S. Senate, tweeted photos of a text message he received from the DSCC asking him to retract his signature.
“If the Green Party is on the ballot it will give Republicans a huge advantage that will help them win in North Carolina in 2022 and 2024,” the text reads.
The N.C. Green Party is a leftist, anti-capitalist party which advocates for free health care, housing as a human right and a host of other progressive changes. For this reason, some Democrats fear that having the Green Party on the ballot would split the vote between the two parties, making it easier for Republicans to win.
At least one person signing the petitions received a call from someone claiming to be with the Green Party who asked them to retract their signature. In an audio clip obtained by the N&O of this call, the caller is asked three times if they are with the Green Party and responds “yes” each time. The language they use matches the language used in the DSCC texts that Hoh shared on Twitter.
“I’m confused,” the person answering the phone tells the caller. “If you’re with the Green Party, why are you asking to remove me?”
Then, the call immediately ended.
The DSCC said that individuals working for it do not identify themselves as affiliated with the Green Party and that all calls from the DSCC end with a disclaimer saying that the group paid for the call.
A Democratic-affiliated law firm, Elias Law Group — started by Marc Elias, former general counsel for Hillary Clinton and John Kerry — submitted a public records request to the State Board of Elections asking for all documentation related to the Green Party’s petition drive, according to a report from WUNC. Elias Law Group is also the counsel for the DSCC, which told the N&O that it received the names of petition signers through a public records request.
Hoh said that the Democratic Party’s efforts to prevent the Green Party’s certification only prove his point about the corruption of the two-party system.
“They do not want to have someone on the ballot who represents working people, and they’ll do whatever they can to keep us off,” Hoh said in a phone interview.
Green Party’s status
The party announced earlier this month that it had collected more than 20,000 signatures to qualify for official recognition and a spot on the 2022 ballot — surpassing the state’s requirement.
However, the State Board of Elections didn’t announce a meeting to certify the party until Wednesday, frustrating party leaders who are scrambling to meet filing deadlines for the election.
”This is the reason why not just in North Carolina, but across the United States, you see so few successful grassroots campaigns,” Hoh said. “...The system of getting on the ballot is deliberately constructed to be onerous, to be exclusionary, to cause such difficulties that a grassroots campaign is not going to have the resources to overcome them.”
The State Board of Elections will consider whether to certify the N.C. Green Party Thursday — giving the party just one day to nominate and file candidates before the July 1 deadline.
The party’s lawyer, Oliver Hall, told the N&O that he had been assured by the state board’s counsel that they would have enough time to file for candidacy after certification. A spokesman for the state board confirmed this and stressed the need for due diligence.
“It is important that the state board’s process for examining the sufficiency of the petitions not be rushed, to ensure that the ultimate decision is justified,” spokesman Pat Gannon said via email to the N&O.
The Green Party’s campaign to appear on the 2022 ballot has been fraught since the beginning. Despite being officially recognized in 2018, the party lost its status in 2021 after it failed to receive 2% of the vote for its gubernatorial or presidential candidates in the 2020 general election.
This meant the party had to collect signatures to get on the ballot — 13,865 signatures, to be exact. The party spent months campaigning across the state and, according to leaders, collected nearly all of its 22,500 signatures by paid volunteers — not petition gathering firms.
According to Hoh, they had all their signatures in by May 17. Then, county boards were supposed to verify the signatures by June 1. Many of these boards did not meet the deadline, leaving party leaders in the lurch.
Gannon said that because the party turned in most of its sheets on the May 17 deadline — which coincided with primary Election Day — it was difficult for county boards to meet deadlines.
Regardless, the State Board of Elections’ petition database showed in early June that, even without some of the county boards’ signatures in, the Green Party had already surpassed the verified signature requirement by over 2,000. Yet the state board hadn’t called a meeting to certify the results.
After weeks of back-and-forth communication, party leaders said they were asked to meet Wednesday with investigators from the state board who had questions about a handful of signatures.
Some of the signatures the board had questions about were collected by First Choice Contracting, Hall said. The board’s concern was with several petition sheets that did not list the county at the top of the page, as is required. However, none of these signatures had been verified, and Hall said the investigation concerned a “very small number of signatures.”
“Those signatures were a moot factor,” Hoh said. They were never validated or verified to begin with, so we’re frustrated at the delay in this because this has had a real effect on our ability to do the necessary next steps that come procedurally as well as for us to run campaigns.”
The state board has not yet responded to questions from the N&O regarding this meeting.
Leaders in the Green Party remain confident that the board will certify their party on Thursday and allow them to run in the midterms.
“There’s nothing that we’ve been told that would give us any indication that there is any reason why we would be precluded from being certified as a political party in North Carolina,” Hoh said.
For more North Carolina government and politics news, listen to the Under the Dome politics podcast from The News & Observer and the NC Insider. You can find it at https://campsite.bio/underthedome or wherever you get your podcasts.
This story was originally published June 28, 2022 at 8:00 AM.