From today’s edition of The News & Observer (N&O), this story by reporter Kyle Ingram:
With a Friday deadline to get its candidates on the ballot, the North Carolina Green Party is now facing another obstacle on top of a string of setbacks: the Democratic Party…
On Saturday, Matthew Hoh, the party’s presumptive nominee for U.S. Senate, tweeted photos of a text message he received from the DSCC asking him to retract his signature…
At least one person signing the petitions received a call from someone claiming to be with the Green Party who asked them to retract their signature. In an audio clip obtained by the N&O of this call, the caller is asked three times if they are with the Green Party and responds “yes” each time. The language they use matches the language used in the DSCC texts that Hoh shared on Twitter.
“I’m confused,” the person answering the phone tells the caller. “If you’re with the Green Party, why are you asking to remove me?”
Then, the call immediately ended.
Kyle Ingram. “‘They’ll do whatever they can to keep us off.’ NC Green Party faces pushback in ballot bid”. The News & Observer, 28 June 2022, https://www.newsobserver.com/news/politics-government/election/article262921498.html.
Sadly, these were not isolated incidents. The Matthew Hoh campaign and North Carolina Green Party (NCGP) have received numerous reports calls and in-person visits to voters who signed the Green’s petition by individuals misrepresenting themselves as associated with the NCGP, and who pressured those voters to disavow their signatures. As the N&O reports, the North Carolina State Board of Elections (NCSBOE) expeditiously responded to a public records request for all documents related to the NCGP’s petition by the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee’s (DSCC) counsel, Elias Law Group (founded by former Hillary Clinton and John Kerry general counsel Marc Elias), after which a barrage of texts and calls to those who signed the petition was launched across the state.
The DSCC’s pretext for challenging the Green’s efforts to regain their ballot line is the brief employment of a professional petitioning firm that has been accused of fraud in another state. Had the Democrats checked, they would have learned that firm’s involvement in the Green’s ballot access campaign only lasted a short time due to its failure to collect the signatures contracted for (they gathered 109 signatures, only half of which turned out to be usable). As NCGP Treasurer Michael Trudeau told the N&O, “The ironic thing here is the insinuation that this so-called fraudulent firm collected all these signatures for us and in reality, the reason why we severed the contract with them is because they didn’t turn in any.”
The “why” of the Democrat’s efforts to keep the NCGP off the ballot isn’t hard to understand, as Matthew Hoh explained to the N&O, “They do not want to have someone on the ballot who represents working people, and they’ll do whatever they can to keep us off.”
This N&O article is the most detailed press account so far of what has been going on behind the scenes of the NCGP’s efforts to regain their ballot line in North Carolina, where a small group of committed volunteers gathered and submitted over 22,500 signatures to county boards of election for verification over the months leading up to the May 17 deadline for filing with the counties. Although some counties failed to examine and return those signatures, and others got a late start in processing those that they had in hand long before May 17, the NCGP was still able to submit almost 16,000 to the NCSBOE on June 1 — something no other petition campaign was able to do in 2022.
Original source can be found here.
