On July 31, one day before the deadline, the Pennsylvania Green Party submitted approximately 100,000 signatures. This is the largest number of signatures collected by any state’s Green Party since the California Green Party obtained 100,897 registered members in late 1991, in order to qualify for the California ballot.
Wow! Good for them. At least we’ll have an alternative in PA if the 3rd Circuit doesn’t come through.
I think it’s more accurate to say the Republicans put the Greens on the ballot, by providing most of the campaign contributions for petition gatherers. The Greens couldn’t have done this on their own.
It was not “the Republicans” as a party who financed the professional petitioners. U.S. Senate candidate Carl Romanelli raised the money from his personal contacts. The people who agreed to give mostly (but not exclusively) give to Republicans, but that’s not the same thing as the Santorum campaign or Republican Party machine planting the Greens on the ballot.
Also, this was not solely a professional effort. Green Party members collected enough signatures to get on the ballot in a “normal” election year. The professional petitioners just made it possible to compensate for this year’s unfortunate quirk.
In any case, hopefully this victory for the PA Greens will not lead anyone to believe that it’s reasonable to ask a qualified party to collect 68,000 signatures to get on the ballot. Even when a party does overcome a hurdle like this, it’s through using up resources that ought to go to the actual election campaign.
Romanelli’s personal contacts? Not “the Republicans”?
Man, that’s some tortured rationalization going on there.
It’s pathetic, in my opinion, that the Democratic Party whines about Republican support for Green Party ballot drives but remains silent when Libertarian Party and Constitution Party candidacies benefit them, as with Tim Johnson’s Senate reelection in South Dakota in 2002. Also, they object strenuously to such “dirty tactics,” but didn’t hesitate to employ similarly sleazy tactics to keep Ralph Nader off of numerous state ballots in 2004.
I will never forget what the Democratic Party of Virginia did in Richmond in 2004 when the Nader campaign filed its signatures there. The little “truth squad” they sent down to the State Board of Elections was curiously non-existent when the Libertarian and Constitution parties filed THEIR signatures.
As others have pointed out here, all of this would be rendered irrelevant if the Democrats would simply come out in support of instant runoff voting.
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