The Green Party of New York has launched a statewide write-in campaign for its presidential ticket of Dr. Jill Stein and Dr. Butch Ware in an effort to regain state ballot access. The party has not held ballot access in New York since 2020.
In a statement this month, the party said it will organize around the Stein-Ware ticket with the goal of securing 130,000 write-in votes. That is the current threshold for a party to qualify for ballot access in either a presidential or gubernatorial election under New York law.
The Green Party of New York lost its ballot line following the 2020 election after then-presidential nominee Howie Hawkins received just under 33,000 votes. That same year, New York adopted new ballot access requirements that raised the petitioning threshold from 5,000 signatures to 45,000 and increased the vote total needed to retain ballot access from 50,000 votes to either two percent of the total vote cast or 130,000 votes in a presidential or gubernatorial election.
As a result, the state Green Party has not held ballot access since then, though it was involved with legal efforts alongside the Libertarian Party of New York to challenge the law and made unsuccessful efforts to qualify through the gubernatorial race in 2022. Earlier this year, Stein also attempted to qualify for the New York ballot through petitioning but was unsuccessful.
The party acknowledged falling several thousand signatures short of the required 45,000 to place Stein and Ware on the ballot, noting petitioners from across New York and the surrounding New England region submitted around 42,000. Even if the campaign had submitted enough signatures, the party estimated that an additional 25,000 signatures would have been necessary to withstand potential challenges and ensure ballot access.
The signature-gathering effort is said to have cost the Stein campaign $300,000, with $36,000 of that coming directly from the Green Party of New York. The party said its focus will now shift to a formal Get Out the Vote campaign, including promotional materials, volunteer coordination, and local events.
Despite the shift to a write-in campaign, the party stated that it will remain involved in several ballot access lawsuits. In the same statement, the party added that it’s not yet over and that it “is co-plaintiff in a lawsuit challenging several undemocratic ballot access laws.”
Last month, the Green Party of New York, along with the Libertarian Party of New York, filed a motion to intervene in Team Kennedy v. Berger, a lawsuit originally filed by the since-suspended Robert F. Kennedy Jr. challenging New York’s independent petitioning laws. Kennedy ultimately lost that suit.
Can they actually get even 1,300 in the real world?
130,000 write-ins? They should be able to get that from NYC alone. Throw in the anti-semitic and anti-scientific students and academics from Albany, Ithaca, Syracuse, Rochester, etc., and they should be able to get many times that number.