WATERTOWN, Wisconsin — There are swing states and then there are swing states like Wisconsin, where four of the last presidential elections in the Dairy State were decided by about 20,000 votes — less than 1 percent.
Even a few thousand votes lost to a third-party presidential candidate could determine the direction of Wisconsin’s coveted ten electoral votes.
David Strang, deputy director of operations for the state’s Democratic National Committee, filed a complaint Wednesday challenging the eligibility of Wisconsin Green Party candidate Jill Stein, who received more than 30,000 votes in the state in the 2016 presidential election.
The complaint alleges that the Wisconsin Green Party, which qualified for the 2022 ballot when a candidate received 1% of the state’s vote, does not have qualified electors to nominate and is therefore violating Wisconsin election law.
The Green Party’s virtual convention is this week, and Stein is expected to win the party’s presidential nomination. Her platform includes left-leaning positions such as codifying Roe v. Wade, abolishing student debt, opposing school choice and supporting the Equality Act, which would add sex, sexual orientation and gender identity to the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
The Wisconsin Green Party website features a May article titled “We Stand with Students, We Stand with GAZA” praising the student protests at the universities of Wisconsin-Madison and Wisconsin-Milwaukee and supporting the students’ demands.
Stein and her campaign manager were arrested in April at Washington University in St. Louis while attending an anti-Israel demonstration.
It would probably be a boon for the Democratic Party to deprive pro-Palestinian voters in Wisconsin of an option.
In the April presidential primary, nearly 48,000 voters cast an “unauthorized vote” in protest of President Biden’s handling of the Israel-Gaza conflict. Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, and Senator Tammy Baldwin (D-Wisconsin) all faced anti-Israel protests and heckling during the campaign in Wisconsin.
WisDem Chairman Ben Wikler said after the primaries that then-Democratic presidential candidate Biden still had a lot to do to earn those unsolicited votes.
The key for Democrats to push pro-Palestinian voters toward Harris now may be to remove other options from the ballot for those voters.
Harris responded in March to a question about the unbound protest vote in neighboring Minnesota.
“They are important,” the Vice President said, “and we care about them.”
“We respect the fact that people have very strong feelings about what we are experiencing,” Harris said, referring to the war between Israel and Hamas.
The DNC staffer filed a complaint against former Green Party candidate Cornel West last week, seeking to deny him access to the ballot as well.
“This is an expedition conjured up by the DNC,” Stein’s campaign manager Jason Call told the Washington Post. “And it’s consistent with what they said in March that they will hire an army of lawyers and infiltrators to find every possible avenue to prevent the Green Party from getting on the ballot.”
“The American people are fed up with these undemocratic practices and we will definitely hire a lawyer to defend our electoral slate in Wisconsin,” Call continued.
In a poll released Wednesday, Harris was ahead of Donald Trump (43%) in Wisconsin with 48% when third-party candidates were included.
The unelected Wisconsin State Election Commission, consisting of six bipartisan members, will decide the fate of Stein, West, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and two other independent candidates at a commission meeting on August 27.
