Shortly before the deadline for Pennsylvania petition challenges, some Pennsylvania Democratic leaders filed a challenge to the statewide Green Party petition.
No one challenged the statewide Libertarian petition, but a challenge was filed to the party’s candidate for U.S. House, 12th district.
Petitioning groups in Pennsylvania no longer need to fear that if the challenges to their petitions are successful, that the petitioning groups will need to pay court costs.
Based on the number of raw signatures that were turned in, I think the Green Party is safe to have their nominees on the ballot. It’s good that the ridiculous court costs were overturned a few years ago. Democrats have always been hostile to the Greens in PA, so I shouldn’t be surprised that this has happened, but it is very disappointing nonetheless.
And that’s why they turned in 3 times the requirement. Because the PA Dems are awful, awful people.
3x is not a guarantee from Philly hood sigs gathered by anyone and everyone hired off the street in a haphazard last minute fashion with multilevel subcontracting and zero validation or quality control of any sort. I’ve seen 20% valid or less for entire crews working in Philly for weeks and maybe even months in that type of throw crap at the wall, emergency crisis cluster environment. While it’s possible there could have been some quality control the fact alone that they didn’t cut it off before 3x coupled with the reported close to deadline dates on a huge proportion is a strong indicator there was none.
Looking at Hawkins web site, it seems he has already missed as many states as Stein 2016 did.
Stein had 3 write in states and 3 no ballot access at all. Hawkins has 5 write in states and 1 no ballot access at all, with a bunch of states still listed as undecided.
The Democrats are strong supporters of the National Popular Vote Compact, but make no effort to alleviate the problems of plurality voting other than suppressing third party and independent candidates.
I have gathered petition signatures in Philadelphia on multiple occasions, and I never had low validity there. I looked up the voter registration statistics for Philadelphia, and I found that around 66% of the general population there is registered to vote, and the percentage of the general population that is registered to vote in the counties that surround Philadelphia are all in the upper 60’s-low 70’s%. If petition circulators get low validity there it is mostly their fault, as they are either incompetent, or they are intentionally not even trying to do it right.
Being that they turned in almost tripple the requirement, the validity rate would have to be terrible for the Greens to not qualify for the PA ballot.
If petition circulators are doing the job properly, there is no reason to turn in so many extra signatures.
I know some of the paid signature gatherers for the Greens in PA worked in Pittsburgh, which is in Allegheny County, also has around 2/3 of the population registered to vote. I have gathered petition signatures there as well, and never had low validity.
When did Philly become one more East Coast RED commie ghetto burg ???
Liberty Green, you’re being too nice about the Democrats; they’re more vile than that.
Philly is not all ghetto. It has plenty of middle class and well off areas. And there are plenty of registered voters in the ghetto areas as well. Including long time homeowners with stable addresses who turn out to vote reliably. The biggest issues with the last minute emergency throw crap at the wall style is not even concentration in the city of phila but the mlm slash and burn last minute crisis hiring of street people and hustlers with zero time or effort at quality control. 20% or less is not abnormal at that point, and not because it’s in any way unavoidable.
Even 10 pct for Trump in 2016 in Philly ???
As someone that has helped successfully defend a state wide ballot access petition in PA, the Democrats did this simple because they can and it is an incredibly laborious task to defend. If the judge orders the Greens to have 20 volunteers for 10 days straight and they can’t come up with that, the Dems win.
It is an incredibly biased process in favor of rejecting signatures. For example, if an objection is made to a signature for any reason (say a bad house number), even if the house number is good but the voter record has a hyphenated last name, but the petition signature doesn’t…it gets struck. Any object (even an invalid one) opens ever aspect to a signature to scrutiny.
I wish the greens good luck.
The Green Party did NOT turn in 3x the required number of signatures; they did turn in 166% of the requirement, if you assume all signatures are valid. I wonder how many of the Green Party signatures were supplied byTrump supporters who would like him to win PA’s electoral votes in 2020. Trump’s actions have been far more detrimental to the Green Party’s aims than Clinton’s would have been. Biden’s actions will be far more sympathetic than Trump’s over the next 4 years. If it’s really about achieving certain goals, not ego, wouldn’t it make sense to vote for the candidate whose positions are more consistent with the goals and who has a chance of winning rather than throw votes away on a candidate who has none? If the Green Party truly wants to achieve success in a national level rather than simply play spoiler it ought to start building up a constituency at a local level first.
If adherents of the Green Party really cared about the environment, they would not do anything to help re-elect Trump, who has withdrawn the US from the Paris Climate Agreement and is in process of reversing every environmental regulation that the Obama administration enacted. I am a member of the NRDC, Greenpeace, and the Sierra Club. That means I’m helping to pay for the lawsuits they have to file to save our lands, animals, and people, from the depredations of polluting industries, abetted by Trump. This is not Europe, where smaller parties have enough of a following that they can influence the composition of the government, and even form a coalition with like-minded parties. Face it—we’re stuck with two parties, and those who “vote their conscience” may once again saddle us with the worst president in history. It’s not about your conscience–it’s about voting for the person who will do the least damage to us and the world.