Montana Green Party candidate fails to get on ballot for special election

On March 1, Ryan Zinke was confirmed as the United States Secretary of the Interior, vacating his seat in the House of Representatives. Gov. Steve Bullock then set the shortest special election calendar legally possible, 85 days.

Thomas Breck was confirmed as the Montana Green Party nominee on March 4 at the party’s first convention in 10 years after being a state delegate for presidential candidate Bernie Sanders. The problem was that over 14,000 signatures were due to the Secretary of State’s office on March 3 for the Green Party candidate to be printed on the ballot.

So the Green Party was given 3 days to nominate a candidate and collect 14,000 signatures. They fell short and appealed their case. The Green Party lost their appeal.

Essentially the duopoly has created a no win situation for emergent parties. So how can we clear these impossible hurdles? For the time being we will have to continue to burn up precious resources in legal fights just to get on the ballot. But there other things we can do.

Every Green Party committee needs a Petition coordinator. Ideally, this person will have experience in circulating petitions in that jurisdiction and will have knowledge of its history of ballot suppression. The job of the Petition coordinator would be to train volunteers in the requirements and technique of signature collection.

The other job would be to organize petition parties. This would essentially jump start the petition process. The petition parties would be hosted by Green Party supporters who would invite friends and neighbors over for a get together and signature collection. Every party would have a notary present so the petitions could be properly notarized then and there.

These parties should be simple affairs, just some mixed nuts and iced tea, nothing fancy. By organizing these parties before the official date of the start of signature collection, you could get a jump start on the process. That is to say, if you knew that signature collection could not start until March 2, beginning February (you could start the process on the theory that Zinke would be confirmed) you would start organizing the petition parties and track how many people had accepted, so you would know how many signatures you could collect on March 2. Indeed, it would make sense to have in mind who would be willing to host such parties and how many signatures they could collect. Thanks to Jill Stein we have a data base of our known supporters, so that would facilitate this sort of organizing.

As the duopoly has set extra hurdles in our path, we have no choice but to consider how we can clear such hurdles.