ALBANY, NY – The New York Green Party, along with presidential candidate Jill Stein’s campaign, says it spent at least $370,000 this year to get Stein on the ballot.
Party co-chair Gloria Mattera said about 100 paid petitioners and volunteers had collected more than 42,000 signatures in about six weeks.
“It was an unprecedented effort,” she said.
And yet it was not enough.
Before the 2020 election, the state increased the minimum threshold for the inclusion of third parties without automatic voting access on the electoral list from 15,000 to 45,000 signatures.
“It’s undemocratic and it’s trying to give voters minimal choice. That’s the Democrats’ main goal,” Mattera said.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s campaign said it spent more than $1 million to collect more than 135,000 signatures, but a lawsuit challenging those signatures over questions about Kennedy’s listed address ended Thursday. A judge is expected to issue a decision soon.
“We say get rid of the 150,000 New Yorkers who want to see him on the ballot, who want to see him as an option or a choice, because something is wrong in some way. (This is) totally arbitrary, unconstitutional, an embarrassment,” said political activist Larry Sharpe.
Sharpe ran for governor of New York on the Libertarian Party line in 2018. In 2022, he filed independent nomination petitions to run again, but the petitions did not hold up in court.
He said the same thing happened to RFK as happened to him, but the situation was even more significant because of the national implications.
“An independent who obviously has fewer resources has to spend a million dollars on just one state,” Sharpe said. “It’s so obviously unfair. So obviously stupid.”
Kennedy’s campaign is challenging several election laws, including the signature requirement, which it says is too burdensome for independent candidates. This week, both the Green Party and the Libertarian Party filed to join the lawsuit in federal court.
Green Party attorney Candace Carpenter said if RFK remains on the ballot, the litigation must continue.
“I believe that’s why RFK invited us to join, because if he’s not removed from the ballot, he believes on principle that New York state law is designed to exclude independent parties from the ballot, which is obviously the case,” she said.
The Green and Libertarian parties unsuccessfully challenged the voting access changes several years ago, but said that while the courts had initially ruled the law constitutional, this time they had numbers, including the amount they had spent, to prove that it did indeed restrict voters’ freedom of choice.
