AOC is completely correct. If you only show up every four years to run for an office you haven’t done the work to win, your purpose is to act as a spoiler candidate. Jill Stein is an unserious person who doesn’t care about winning.
There’s nothing wrong with third-parties, but if you’re just running for offices you literally won’t win, you’re a joke. Greens can run and win in down-ballot elections, but winning the presidency is a farcical idea until they actually put in the work to win in more local races.
Green Party candidates got caught forging signatures of constituents to have their candidates added on local ballots. I actually reported several instances of this happening last election and it resulted in several of their candidates being investigated and disqualified. These idiots were paying their low level staffers minimum wage to knock on doors for signatures and when they didn’t meet their quota, they just straight up forged signatures of constituents.
The evidence was so damning, too. Their candidates were specifically focused on areas where they could siphon off a Democrat win, but not areas where they could siphon off a Republican win. The signatures were analyzed by pros who determined that they were fraudulent and all exhibited the same slant/pattern, and this happened for several candidates. Not to mention Jill Stein’s sketchy ass relationship with Vladimir Putin and senior level Trump staffers like Michael Flynn. But yeah, let’s downplay why Jill Stein inexplicably was invited to a gala in Moscow by Putin…
Going back to my initial rant… Yeah, the Green Party is sketchy as fuck and have been caught red-handed trying to fuck up local elections. Even their candidates’ YouTube channels sometimes use the same staffers posing as regular people, it’s like the most embarrassing attempt at looking serious. On reddit and YouTube, they’ve got like 3 staffers who monitor posts/video comments like hawks and they astroturf like cra-zy when a Green candidate is getting shit on.
Do you have any sources for these incidents? Those are very serious crimes and should be pretty easy to produce sources for. A quick internet search on my end only yielded instances of Republicans (no surprise there) forging signatures/ballots.
Matthew Hoh comes to mind. He was a Green Party candidate whose campaign was astroturfed insanely hard. He got booted off the ballot because hundreds of signatures from his party’s petition campaign got thrown out for being fraudulent.
Upon discovering the fraudulent signatures, the North Carolina Democratic party and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, Hoh’s party recognition was denied by the NC State Board of Elections. The Green Party later sued the NC SBoE. While this was happening, the DSCC started contacting voters who signed the Green Party’s petition and urged them to vote for the Democrats.
Some key points:
During the initial audit of signatures (standard for all potential candidates), a sample of the entire signature roll is taken and assessed. When the Green Party’s signatures were audited, there was a high enough percentage of blatantly fraudulent signatures and other irregularities (i.e. made up addresses) to result in a disqualification.
Matthew Hoh and the NC Green Party appealed the NC SBoE’s decision, claiming that the amount of disputed signatures wouldn’t be enough to reduce their total signatures to a point that didn’t meet the minimum threshold
Hoh and the Green Party succeeded in court and also sued the DCSS for their lawsuit. This is where I call BS for a number of reasons, the main one being the court’s explanation for why Hoh’s appeal succeeded. They essentially agreed with the Green Party’s assertion that even if you removed the disputed signatures, they would meet the minimum threshold to be on the NC ballot.
This was NOT the damn reason they were disqualified in the first place. The NC SBoE initially disqualified them because the percentage of signatures deemed to be fraudulent met the threshold for disqualification. Part of why the DCSS called out the Green Party so hard was that there were too many coincidences. The repeat signatures that were "accidents" (how? how does that "accidentally" happen?), the missing addresses that were filled out by staffers… So the appellate court decision didn’t even contradict the initial NC SBoE disqualification reasoning and instead, a completely new, irrelevant argument was made and accepted.
The petitioning firm chosen by the Green Party was owned and operated by a man with a documented history of fraud-- Shawn Wilmoth. Wilmoth pled guilty to election fraud in 2011 in Virginia, and in 2022 he was being investigated for election fraud in Michigan. There’s ignorance and then there’s wilful ignorance with malicious intent, and I’m convinced this is the latter.
Source: NC Local news-- check The News & Observer. I’m exhausted today but everything I wrote above has been covered in detail by News Observer, with sources/citations. I don’t normally waste my time going down rabbit holes like this but there were way too many weirdo red flags to ignore when that election was gearing up. The astroturfing on reddit and YouTube was so shameless.
edit: Another thing. The signatures for these petitions are often publicly accessible. If you check Green Party signatures, you’ll notice a pattern of fraudulent signatures. The documents are usually available as PDFs.
Edit: Is there a way to disable replies? I am interested in discussing this further but just not today and I don’t want to be bothered with notifications about this. It was so damn exhausting when it initially happened because I had to deal with so many gullible people rabidly defending the Green Party and completely ignoring the fraud.
Edit 2: I’ll give an example:
Let’s say my local election says I need 1000 signatures to qualify on the ballot, and that if 10% of my signatures are deemed fraudulent, I will be disqualified. If I get 5000 signatures and it turns out 1500 of them are fraudulent, the local election rules would result in my disqualification because more than 10% of my votes were fraudulent. This was essentially the NC State Board of Elections’ reasoning for Matthew Hoh’s initial disqualification.
The appeal that Hoh and the Green Party won, was based on reasoning that effectively excludes any consideration with respect to a high volume of fraudulent signatures being an indicator of an illegitimate candidate. Instead, the appellate court basically said "Forget the 1500 fraudulent signatures-- those are gone, we don’t care about that. What we care about are the remaining 3500 signatures-- 3500 is 2500 more than the minimum threshold, so you actually DID qualify". It makes absolutely no sense and every time Matthew Hoh parades around this trash-tier appellate court decision, he conveniently omits any discussion regarding the stupidly blatant signatures that were forged, or the fact that the petitioning firm his party chose just happens to be pretty well-versed in election fraud.
Signature Collection Campaign Fraud Defendants to Face Trial
^ This is the same guy that Matthew Hoh and the North Carolina Green Party went with when they chose a petitioning firm. They knew what they were doing and this isn’t his first rodeo with election fraud. Wilmoth isn’t being charged in relation to any Green Party candidates in the USA despite the Green Party spending loads of money on his petitioning firm. Why wouldn’t they want their money back? Because they know the moment they’re told to hand over their communications/records/etc., the fraud will become even more apparent. Their constituents should be fuming about their Green Party donations being pissed away on a company that lead to the party being accused of fraud, and yet… crickets. Why?
The U.S. District Court determined that some of the actions of those two Democratic Party bodies was “frivolous, unreasonable, and without foundation”, so the Democrats must pay $6 525 to the Green Party’s attorney. Green Party of North Carolina v North Carolina State Board of Elections source
The Democratic Party lost this case in court, but the damage had already been done.
https://www.newsobserver.com/ <-- everything I said in my comment is covered on article’s in this NC news outlet. They have about 5 articles that cover what I wrote and their journalists do a good job providing sources/citations.
tl;dr Matthew Hoh and the NC Green Party got caught hiring a petitioning firm with a long reputation of election fraud and hundreds of petition signatures were thrown out for being fraudulent. Dems went HAM and called all the people whose names were on the signature list, urging them to vote for Dems instead of Greens. Hoh and the Green Party get disqualified by the NC State Board of Elections (SBoE) for fraudulent signatures, and they appeal it.
Fast forward and now their disqualification was successfully appealed and the NC SBoE now accepts them on the (now expired) ballot. What changed? Well… the criteria for why they were disqualified, apparently. The NC SBoE initially disqualified the Green Party after a sampling of signatures revealed a percentage of fraudulent signatures and irregularities that would meet the threshold for disqualification. In the appeals court, they basically said "okay okay so SOME of the signatures were blatantly fraudulent and yes you just happened to have hired a petitioning firm with a long history of election fraud, BUT none of that matters because excluding the disputed signatures, you still meet the minimum level of signatures required to be on the ballot." The appeal succeeds, Green Party then cites that in order to successfully sue the DSCC, and they claim vindication while saying jack shit about the fraudulent signatures.
Now ask yourself, does that make any fucking sense? To me, it makes no sense whatsoever and it reeks of political fuckery by a party with a long history of trying to siphon votes from Dems so they can be useful idiots for Republicans.
The Democratic Party has been ordered to pay the North Carolina Green Party’s legal fees due to ‘frivolous’ and ‘unreasonable’ intervention in the third party’s battle for ballot access in 2022.
^ This one. What I wrote to you was my (poor) attempt at a briefer version that is missing the answer to your question-- which I did address in the above linked comment that I made to another user. The criteria used to disqualify the Green Party (X amount of fraudulent signatures in their petition to have Hoh added to the ballot) was completely disregarded by the appellate court, who took the bizarre approach of completely disregarding the blatantly fraudulent signatures and instead basically said "okay well even without the fraudulent votes, they still have enough for their candidate to qualify". This flies in the face of the original NC SBoE (state board of elections) decision and doesn’t even address the root problem-- fraudulent votes, and why the NC Green Party had enough to get initially disqualified.
The other issue is that the Green Party just happened to have hired a petitioning firm that has a long history of election fraud. The owner/operator was convicted of election fraud in 2011 and in 2022 became the subject of an investigation regarding election fraud in Michigan. This was brought up by the Dems and the DSCC in their legal action and it was just inexplicably not addressed at all in court. Instead, it was just dismissed/downplayed as nothing more than a baseless political accusation.
I’m glad you responded with your comment because IMO it highlights exactly how effective the Green Party’s smarmy tactics are. People understandably read the headlines and are often not aware of the missing links that can only be put together if you read several articles about the issue from different periods of time. I’ve been following the Matt Hoh thing from the start and I’ve seen the PDFs of the fraudulent signatures-- it’s fucking clown show level fraud, like the kind of forged signatures you might see as an elementary school teacher from a bratty student. Personally, I don’t believe for a second that the Green Party did absolutely no vetting of the petitioning firm they chose-- I think they 100% were aware of the owner’s past and present election fraud and that’s exactly why they chose that specific firm out of countless others with a far better reputation.
I read the court docket. The fraudulent signatures are irrelevant because they exceeded the threshold, and were done by contracted third parties. The candidates appeared on the ballot, and lost.
The fraudulent signatures are irrelevant because they exceeded the threshold, and were done by contracted third parties.
How are the fraudulent signatures irrelevant? They were obtained by a firm hired by the Green Party whose owner was convicted of election fraud in VA and is currently on trial for election fraud in MI? I find it hard to believe that the Green Party was approached by this guy (whose record is plainly available to the public), did absolutely no vetting, and entrusted him with one of the most important parts of getting their candidate on the ballot. Shawn Wilmoth, the owner of the firm contracted by the Green Party, has multiple complainants who will testify against him in the MI fraud trial-- none of which are Green Party candidates. Same with NC and every other state his firm operated in-- lots of fraud, but Green Party candidates for some strange reason never take him to court. I suspect it’s because doing so would involve mutual disclosure that would reveal that the Green Party did know if Wilmoth’s reputation and that’s precisely why they wanted him. When you know your candidate is going to lose and you’re just in it to spoil an election, who cares if there’s some fallout afterwards?
Matthew Martucci, the NC SBoE’s lead investigator stated
“The Investigation Division elevated the Green Party investigation as a potentially
criminal matter with high priority due to observing a pattern of petition pages
submitted containing what appeared to be noticeably fraudulent signatures”
This pattern isn’t mentioned anywhere in the court decision, and is part of why I question the seemingly selective omissions in the decision. Every legitimate candidate that got burned by Shawn Wilmoth is taking his ass to court, meanwhile Green Party candidates aren’t taking legal action nor are they explaining to their voters why they’re just letting some fraud get away with the thousands of dollars they gave him.
AOC is completely correct. If you only show up every four years to run for an office you haven’t done the work to win, your purpose is to act as a spoiler candidate. Jill Stein is an unserious person who doesn’t care about winning.
There’s nothing wrong with third-parties, but if you’re just running for offices you literally won’t win, you’re a joke. Greens can run and win in down-ballot elections, but winning the presidency is a farcical idea until they actually put in the work to win in more local races.
Green Party candidates got caught forging signatures of constituents to have their candidates added on local ballots. I actually reported several instances of this happening last election and it resulted in several of their candidates being investigated and disqualified. These idiots were paying their low level staffers minimum wage to knock on doors for signatures and when they didn’t meet their quota, they just straight up forged signatures of constituents.
The evidence was so damning, too. Their candidates were specifically focused on areas where they could siphon off a Democrat win, but not areas where they could siphon off a Republican win. The signatures were analyzed by pros who determined that they were fraudulent and all exhibited the same slant/pattern, and this happened for several candidates. Not to mention Jill Stein’s sketchy ass relationship with Vladimir Putin and senior level Trump staffers like Michael Flynn. But yeah, let’s downplay why Jill Stein inexplicably was invited to a gala in Moscow by Putin…
Going back to my initial rant… Yeah, the Green Party is sketchy as fuck and have been caught red-handed trying to fuck up local elections. Even their candidates’ YouTube channels sometimes use the same staffers posing as regular people, it’s like the most embarrassing attempt at looking serious. On reddit and YouTube, they’ve got like 3 staffers who monitor posts/video comments like hawks and they astroturf like cra-zy when a Green candidate is getting shit on.
Do you have any sources for these incidents? Those are very serious crimes and should be pretty easy to produce sources for. A quick internet search on my end only yielded instances of Republicans (no surprise there) forging signatures/ballots.
Matthew Hoh comes to mind. He was a Green Party candidate whose campaign was astroturfed insanely hard. He got booted off the ballot because hundreds of signatures from his party’s petition campaign got thrown out for being fraudulent.
Upon discovering the fraudulent signatures, the North Carolina Democratic party and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, Hoh’s party recognition was denied by the NC State Board of Elections. The Green Party later sued the NC SBoE. While this was happening, the DSCC started contacting voters who signed the Green Party’s petition and urged them to vote for the Democrats.
Some key points:
During the initial audit of signatures (standard for all potential candidates), a sample of the entire signature roll is taken and assessed. When the Green Party’s signatures were audited, there was a high enough percentage of blatantly fraudulent signatures and other irregularities (i.e. made up addresses) to result in a disqualification.
Matthew Hoh and the NC Green Party appealed the NC SBoE’s decision, claiming that the amount of disputed signatures wouldn’t be enough to reduce their total signatures to a point that didn’t meet the minimum threshold
Hoh and the Green Party succeeded in court and also sued the DCSS for their lawsuit. This is where I call BS for a number of reasons, the main one being the court’s explanation for why Hoh’s appeal succeeded. They essentially agreed with the Green Party’s assertion that even if you removed the disputed signatures, they would meet the minimum threshold to be on the NC ballot.
This was NOT the damn reason they were disqualified in the first place. The NC SBoE initially disqualified them because the percentage of signatures deemed to be fraudulent met the threshold for disqualification. Part of why the DCSS called out the Green Party so hard was that there were too many coincidences. The repeat signatures that were "accidents" (how? how does that "accidentally" happen?), the missing addresses that were filled out by staffers… So the appellate court decision didn’t even contradict the initial NC SBoE disqualification reasoning and instead, a completely new, irrelevant argument was made and accepted.
The petitioning firm chosen by the Green Party was owned and operated by a man with a documented history of fraud-- Shawn Wilmoth. Wilmoth pled guilty to election fraud in 2011 in Virginia, and in 2022 he was being investigated for election fraud in Michigan. There’s ignorance and then there’s wilful ignorance with malicious intent, and I’m convinced this is the latter.
Source: NC Local news-- check The News & Observer. I’m exhausted today but everything I wrote above has been covered in detail by News Observer, with sources/citations. I don’t normally waste my time going down rabbit holes like this but there were way too many weirdo red flags to ignore when that election was gearing up. The astroturfing on reddit and YouTube was so shameless.
edit: Another thing. The signatures for these petitions are often publicly accessible. If you check Green Party signatures, you’ll notice a pattern of fraudulent signatures. The documents are usually available as PDFs.
Edit: Is there a way to disable replies? I am interested in discussing this further but just not today and I don’t want to be bothered with notifications about this. It was so damn exhausting when it initially happened because I had to deal with so many gullible people rabidly defending the Green Party and completely ignoring the fraud.
Edit 2: I’ll give an example:
Let’s say my local election says I need 1000 signatures to qualify on the ballot, and that if 10% of my signatures are deemed fraudulent, I will be disqualified. If I get 5000 signatures and it turns out 1500 of them are fraudulent, the local election rules would result in my disqualification because more than 10% of my votes were fraudulent. This was essentially the NC State Board of Elections’ reasoning for Matthew Hoh’s initial disqualification.
The appeal that Hoh and the Green Party won, was based on reasoning that effectively excludes any consideration with respect to a high volume of fraudulent signatures being an indicator of an illegitimate candidate. Instead, the appellate court basically said "Forget the 1500 fraudulent signatures-- those are gone, we don’t care about that. What we care about are the remaining 3500 signatures-- 3500 is 2500 more than the minimum threshold, so you actually DID qualify". It makes absolutely no sense and every time Matthew Hoh parades around this trash-tier appellate court decision, he conveniently omits any discussion regarding the stupidly blatant signatures that were forged, or the fact that the petitioning firm his party chose just happens to be pretty well-versed in election fraud.
Last point before I go to sleep:
https://www.michigan.gov/ag/news/press-releases/2024/06/13/signature-collection-campaign-fraud-defendants-to-face-trial
^ This is the same guy that Matthew Hoh and the North Carolina Green Party went with when they chose a petitioning firm. They knew what they were doing and this isn’t his first rodeo with election fraud. Wilmoth isn’t being charged in relation to any Green Party candidates in the USA despite the Green Party spending loads of money on his petitioning firm. Why wouldn’t they want their money back? Because they know the moment they’re told to hand over their communications/records/etc., the fraud will become even more apparent. Their constituents should be fuming about their Green Party donations being pissed away on a company that lead to the party being accused of fraud, and yet… crickets. Why?
The Democratic Party lost this case in court, but the damage had already been done.
I second the call for sources, that is very interesting.
Check my reply below.
https://www.newsobserver.com/ <-- everything I said in my comment is covered on article’s in this NC news outlet. They have about 5 articles that cover what I wrote and their journalists do a good job providing sources/citations.
tl;dr Matthew Hoh and the NC Green Party got caught hiring a petitioning firm with a long reputation of election fraud and hundreds of petition signatures were thrown out for being fraudulent. Dems went HAM and called all the people whose names were on the signature list, urging them to vote for Dems instead of Greens. Hoh and the Green Party get disqualified by the NC State Board of Elections (SBoE) for fraudulent signatures, and they appeal it.
Fast forward and now their disqualification was successfully appealed and the NC SBoE now accepts them on the (now expired) ballot. What changed? Well… the criteria for why they were disqualified, apparently. The NC SBoE initially disqualified the Green Party after a sampling of signatures revealed a percentage of fraudulent signatures and irregularities that would meet the threshold for disqualification. In the appeals court, they basically said "okay okay so SOME of the signatures were blatantly fraudulent and yes you just happened to have hired a petitioning firm with a long history of election fraud, BUT none of that matters because excluding the disputed signatures, you still meet the minimum level of signatures required to be on the ballot." The appeal succeeds, Green Party then cites that in order to successfully sue the DSCC, and they claim vindication while saying jack shit about the fraudulent signatures.
Now ask yourself, does that make any fucking sense? To me, it makes no sense whatsoever and it reeks of political fuckery by a party with a long history of trying to siphon votes from Dems so they can be useful idiots for Republicans.
Then why did they lose in court?
I mentioned this in my original comment. I think I worded my response to you poorly.
When I said “Check out my reply”, I meant check out my reply below in the thread.
https://lemmy.ml/post/19841605/13414777
^ This one. What I wrote to you was my (poor) attempt at a briefer version that is missing the answer to your question-- which I did address in the above linked comment that I made to another user. The criteria used to disqualify the Green Party (X amount of fraudulent signatures in their petition to have Hoh added to the ballot) was completely disregarded by the appellate court, who took the bizarre approach of completely disregarding the blatantly fraudulent signatures and instead basically said "okay well even without the fraudulent votes, they still have enough for their candidate to qualify". This flies in the face of the original NC SBoE (state board of elections) decision and doesn’t even address the root problem-- fraudulent votes, and why the NC Green Party had enough to get initially disqualified.
The other issue is that the Green Party just happened to have hired a petitioning firm that has a long history of election fraud. The owner/operator was convicted of election fraud in 2011 and in 2022 became the subject of an investigation regarding election fraud in Michigan. This was brought up by the Dems and the DSCC in their legal action and it was just inexplicably not addressed at all in court. Instead, it was just dismissed/downplayed as nothing more than a baseless political accusation.
I’m glad you responded with your comment because IMO it highlights exactly how effective the Green Party’s smarmy tactics are. People understandably read the headlines and are often not aware of the missing links that can only be put together if you read several articles about the issue from different periods of time. I’ve been following the Matt Hoh thing from the start and I’ve seen the PDFs of the fraudulent signatures-- it’s fucking clown show level fraud, like the kind of forged signatures you might see as an elementary school teacher from a bratty student. Personally, I don’t believe for a second that the Green Party did absolutely no vetting of the petitioning firm they chose-- I think they 100% were aware of the owner’s past and present election fraud and that’s exactly why they chose that specific firm out of countless others with a far better reputation.
I read the court docket. The fraudulent signatures are irrelevant because they exceeded the threshold, and were done by contracted third parties. The candidates appeared on the ballot, and lost.
How are the fraudulent signatures irrelevant? They were obtained by a firm hired by the Green Party whose owner was convicted of election fraud in VA and is currently on trial for election fraud in MI? I find it hard to believe that the Green Party was approached by this guy (whose record is plainly available to the public), did absolutely no vetting, and entrusted him with one of the most important parts of getting their candidate on the ballot. Shawn Wilmoth, the owner of the firm contracted by the Green Party, has multiple complainants who will testify against him in the MI fraud trial-- none of which are Green Party candidates. Same with NC and every other state his firm operated in-- lots of fraud, but Green Party candidates for some strange reason never take him to court. I suspect it’s because doing so would involve mutual disclosure that would reveal that the Green Party did know if Wilmoth’s reputation and that’s precisely why they wanted him. When you know your candidate is going to lose and you’re just in it to spoil an election, who cares if there’s some fallout afterwards?
Matthew Martucci, the NC SBoE’s lead investigator stated
“The Investigation Division elevated the Green Party investigation as a potentially criminal matter with high priority due to observing a pattern of petition pages submitted containing what appeared to be noticeably fraudulent signatures”
This pattern isn’t mentioned anywhere in the court decision, and is part of why I question the seemingly selective omissions in the decision. Every legitimate candidate that got burned by Shawn Wilmoth is taking his ass to court, meanwhile Green Party candidates aren’t taking legal action nor are they explaining to their voters why they’re just letting some fraud get away with the thousands of dollars they gave him.
Would an unserious person meet up with Putin to kiss his ass tho??
Democrats tried to incriminate her for three years on fake “muh poootin” charges and found nothing. But don’t let that get in the way of your agenda.
The “incriminating” part is that she went which isn’t debated
Sorry did Jill Stein go to an AIPAC conference to pledge her loyalty to poootin?
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