The Supreme Court has rejected an emergency appeal from Nevada’s Green Party seeking to include presidential candidate Jill Stein on the ballot in the battleground state.
The court’s order Friday, without any noted dissents, allows ballot preparation and printing to proceed in Nevada without Stein and other Green Party candidates included.
The outcome is a victory for Democrats who had challenged the Greens’ inclusion on the ballot in a state with a history of extremely close statewide races. In 2020, President Joe Biden outpaced former President Donald Trump by fewer than 35,000 votes in the state.
Nevada uses two forms for gathering signatures, one for candidates and another for ballot initiatives. The Secretary of State gave the Green Party the wrong form. The forms are basically identical.
It is not the first time Democrats has used dubious methods to deprive Green Party ballot access.
Yeah sure, it’s the Democrats who are being dubious here…
And that is followed by
Not Democratic party malfeasance.
It is - the wrong forms were disbursed and then rejected while all the actual requirements were fulfilled.
This is clearly anti-democratic and unlikely to have any actual effect on the election outside making Democrats look bad.
No. If it reflects negatively on anyone it would be the Nevada and US courts, the Nevada official who handed out the paperwork, and of course the Stein operation for not catching it. The last two have the capacity to catch this. Not the Democratic party.
And no one in the Green Party looked at the forms to make sure they had the right ones? How many people handled those forms without noticing they were wrong? Are they too used to Cyrillic that it’s hard to read English forms?
They did make sure, by seeking guidance from the person that runs the election.
Having read the forms necessary to get a candidate or initiative on the ballot, I can tell you they are not hard to tell apart if you actually read them. A campaign that is serious about their stated goals would do the basic work of reading the form.
I havent been able to find them forms yet, do you have links to Nevada’s?
Apologies, but I was reading them in person so I don’t have links to them. Maybe try on the website for the secretary of state in Nevada?
you misspelled ‘Green Party incompetence and/or procrastination’
Seems as fishy as Stein’s intentions.
The outcome would either be a victory for the Democrats or a victory for the Republicans. So what part is fishy?
On top of that, Nevada’s governor is a Republican.
Nah, keeping Stein on the ballot (for this reason) would be a win for our democracy. If there’s a credible case to formally accuse her of being a Russian asset and bar her from participation on those grounds I’m happy to see it go through. This is just arbitrary and authoritarian. I’m not okay with embracing authoritarianism to overcome fascism - there are better tools to beat Trump.
Yea, I’m familiar with the photo - that’s why I mentioned a case to formally bar her above. That photo could lead to an absolutely valid prohibition on participating in elections - so let’s go that route instead of bureaucratic bullshit.
Or campaigns could be expected to pay attention to the text of a document given to them.
Let’s say you wanted to replace your bathtub and went to the city to get a permit to work on shared building plumbing - you get the form for “Water basin modifications” and pass it off to be signed by your contractor and the building’s HOA council and then add all the relevant details about sizing and materials involved.
You return the form and are told to await a response by mail… six weeks later it hasn’t arrived. It turns out that “Water basin modification” form you were issued was actually for replacing an underlayer but limited to showers - you actually needed the “Water (standing) basin modification” form that was valid for bathtubs. Now everything you did with the form (getting it signed by various parties, filling in sizing and material information) was correct - so wouldn’t it be really nice if the clerk handling your form had said “Whoops lets just staple the form you filled out to the correct one and notarize the correction, then we can file it and send you a reply” instead of just rejecting it without a clear reason?
People working in these systems can be reasonable and flexible.
…you want to use State power to bar a US citizen from running for office because she appeared in a photo, but you’re accusing us of being arbitrary and authoritarian?
No? If Stein will be disqualified I want it to go through the courts rather than being at the whims of bureaucracy.
I’d like an actual burden of proof for someone to be ineligible to run for president.
Someone who’s campaign doesn’t bother to read the forms they’re submitting to be included on the ballot should not be considered a serious candidate. Russian stooge or not Stein is incompetent and uncommitted to her espoused ideals.
They didn’t file the correct paperwork. They are not a victim here. They are ducking adults representing a ducking national party. You check the forms and make sure they are correct before you file them.
This is not hard. Every adult does it multiple times every year for all sorts of reasons. It’s a basic citizenship skill.
The fact that you can mess this up AND REFUSE TO TAKE RESPONSIBILITY FOR IT like a ducking toddler makes it very clear they are not a serious political party.
You’re an adult you can fucking swear.
They were given the wrong forms when they requested the correct ones - the two forms are nearly indistinguishable and neither the issuer nor collector noticed the mistake at the time.
This was a really minor bureaucratic screw up and denying the green party a place on the ballot because of the mistake is just a bad look.
Good thing we don’t expect a president and their staff to be able to pay attention to detail.
Given the news currently brewing in Georgia we can expect some similar bureaucratic bullshit to be used against the Harris campaign - it’ll be bullshit just like this is bullshit.
You know these people have lawyers, right? It’s literally a lawyer’s job to go over these documents with a fine-toothed comb specifically due to these sort of things.
Most voters don’t have an attorney checking their mail-in ballot.
Yes? And? This is about a campaign, not the people who vote for them. Maybe you want a president who can be tricked by something this easy, but I’d say most people would want a president who can avoid such simple pitfalls.
I don’t think running for elected office should require a team of high paid lawyers - president in our current system is unrealistic for any person off the street but part of the reason we have AOC today is because the election registration process is accessible to people who have limited resources but a lot of enthusiasm.
Forms like this shouldn’t require the fine toothed comb.
You could not have picked a worse example for your position.
AOC crosses the Ts. She dots the Is. And she sure as shit DOES NOT SUBMIT THE WRONG FORM WHEN FILLING FOR AN ELECTION.
These guys are no AOC.
You don’t think this shit happens to people after they become president too? I’m sorry, if this was political dirty tricks and you can’t handle really basic political dirty tricks, you deserve what you get.
Yes. The GP said all of that. The thing is, none of it matters. It’s the responsibility of the submitter to submit the correct forms. It’s bureaucracy 101.
Also, of course the forms are similar. They are from the same agency for a similar purpose. But details matter in this business.
Every legal form has a form number. Anyone practicing law should know what number they require and verify if it’s incorrect. Her legal team shit the bed
I’m glad she’s not on the ballot. But I don’t like these bad faith technicalities. Although I do put 90% of the blame on the enforcers.
We just had a ballot initiative in Arkansas fall off because they were told the wrong thing by officials. And even then, they did all the things they were supposed to do (similar to this situation).
So the party that wants to have the responsibility of running the most powerful nation in the world didn’t double check the title of the paperwork they submitted?
This isn’t a normal person getting the wrong tax form in the mail and not noticing it. This is an entire party with nationwide offices and tons of people supporting it failing to recognize they were filling out the wrong form.
The more important question is, “when did they submit the paperwork and when were they notified that the paperwork was incorrect?” If the gap is really small, then they should have filed sooner. If the gap was really long, then maybe there was some fuckery going on.
EDIT - That said, I still hate when minor technicalities thwart important things.
Yeah, except that they did double check. That’s fairly clear if you go back and read what happened when. You can argue that they should have triple checked or checked with different people, if you want to.
LMFAO at trying to blame a secretary of state for a very old and experienced political party using the wrong damn form
If you think Democrats are bad, you should see hostile foreign entities. If you can’t do your bureaucratic due diligence to double check election forms, you are absolutely not qualified to lead an entire country.