Campaign Literature Archive « New York Governor « Press Releases on Ballot Access
Hawkins/Mattera for NY
July 1, 2022

Greens Cry Foul on Ballot Access Process for Independent Candidates

The Green Party gubernatorial ticket expressed its outrage today at the ballot access process for independent candidates for Governor and Lt. Governor in New York.

On Monday, June 27, the state Board of Elections ruled as invalid the independent nominating petitions of the Green Party and all four other gubernatorial candidates who are not already on the ballot as the Democratic and Republican candidates on the grounds of insufficient signatures. The other petitions were for the Libertarian, Unite, Freedom, and New Visions candidates.

Under New York Election Law §6-154(1), the Board of Elections is required to view a ballot access petition as “presumptively valid if it is in proper form and appears to bear the requisite number of signatures.” Contrary to past practice, the Board of Elections did not hold hearings with the candidates and their objectors present to review the objections filed against their petitions. Instead, the Board of Elections staff did their own review and recommended invalidating all the petitions without an opportunity for the candidates to defend their petitions.

If these rulings stand, only the candidates of the Democratic and Republican parties will be on the November general election ballot. 2022 would be the first year since 1946, and the only other time since the state began issuing official ballots in 1890, when only the candidates of the Democratic and Republican candidates have been on the ballot.

“The Democrats’ goal in their ballot access exclusion law of 2020 was to eliminate competition from alternative parties. If we don’t win our pending case in court against this law, the Democrats will have achieved their party suppression goals for this year’s election,” said Howie Hawkins, the Green nominee for Governor.

The Election Law enables ballot qualified parties to nominate their gubernatorial tickets by convention without requiring a petition. The Greens had expected to nominate by convention in 2022 because in 2018 its gubernatorial ticket received more than double the required votes to win a ballot line for four years under the Election Law at the time. However, the Democrats pushed through changes to ballot access laws as part of the state budget package in April 2020 that led to the Greens losing ballot status.

“Democrat Kathy Hochul and Republican Lee Zeldin didn’t have to collect a single signature to be on the ballot,” noted Gloria Mattera, the Green candidate for Lt. Governor. “The Democrats changed the Election Law so the Greens had to get three times as many signatures as before just to get back on the ballot. None of the independent candidates were able to meet that signature threshold. That demonstrates that the new ballot access law is exclusionary. It must be changed if New York is to be an inclusive multi-party democracy.”

“New York is now effectively a one-party dictatorship. The Democrats hold the governorship and super-majorities in both chambers of the legislature. The new ballot access restrictions combined with single-member-district winner-take-all elections means one-party rule when Republican enrollment is less than half of Democratic enrollment. Whether we are on the ballot or not, the Green Party will continue to fight for a fair ballot access law as well as ranked choice voting, including proportional ranked choice voting for the state legislature, in order give all parties their fair and proportional share of power in state government,” Hawkins said.

The Green Party still hopes to be placed on the ballot by winning litigation they filed jointly with the Libertarian Party in Libertarian Party of New York et al. v. New York State Board of Elections. The case is now on appeal in the Second Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals after the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York ruled against the Libertarians and Greens in May 2021. They filed a motion on June 20 asking the Second Circuit Court to place their parties on the ballot or at least expedite the case so it is decided in time for the general election in November.

Hawkins/Mattera for NY
June 22, 2022

Green Party Goes to Court for Ballot Access

The Green and Libertarian parties filed a motion in the 2nd Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals this week requesting an injunction to place their gubernatorial tickets on the ballot for the general election in November.

Both parties face specific objections to their ballot access petitions that state they submitted less than the required 45,000 signatures. Seven independent nominating petitions were submitted, none had more than 45,000 signatures, and all have been objected to on the grounds of insufficient signatures.

The state Board of Elections is expected to rule on those objections at its June 27 meeting. If the parties do not win their case, 2022 will be the only time in New York’s history except 1954 and 1878 when only two candidates for governor appeared on the ballot.

“The thousands of voters who signed our petitions to put us on the ballot is what should matter, not a Draconian ballot access law designed to protect the two major parties from electoral competition,” said Howie Hawkins, the Green nominee for Governor.

Gloria Mattera, the Greens’ nominee for Lt. Governor, said, “We know that former Governor Andrew Cuomo and Democratic Party state chair Jay Jacobs pushed for this ballot access exclusion law because they have no respect for the voters or democratic norms. But where are the self-styled Democratic socialists and progressives on this law? Their silence is deafening.”

The motion was filed as part of an existing appeal by the Green and Libertarian parties of a district court decision that rejected their request for an injunction against implementing the restrictive ballot access law enacted by New York State in 2020. That law tripled the signature requirement from 15,000 to 45,000; more than tripled the votes required from 50,000 to 130,000 or 2%, whichever is greater and was over 173,000 votes in 2020; doubled the frequency the vote requirement must be met from every four years to every two years; and increased five-fold the number of signatures a statewide candidate must get in half the congressional districts from 100 to 500.

The motion filed this week asks the court to place the parties on the ballot or expedite the appeal so the case is decided in time for the November election. The motion argues that the parties are likely to win their appeal and so will be irreparably harmed if the case is not expedited or there is not an injunction placing them on the ballot.

The motion argues that the public interest will be served by granting ballot access to the candidates of the third and fourth largest parties in the nation. It also argues that the change of congressional district lines in the middle of the petitioning period that was not resolved until the last week of petitioning made it impossible for the parties to meet the distribution requirement of at least 500 signatures from half the congressional districts.

The parties’ court documents are attached.

Stay Brief | Stay Exhibits | Stay Motion Part 1

Hawkins/Mattera for NY
June 9, 2022

Greens Damn Democrats for Anti-Democratic Assault on Ballot Access

June 9, 2022 – The Green Party gubernatorial ticket decried today the objections filed by Democrats against their independent nominating petition.

“We are not surprised that the objections were filed by Nassau County minions of the chair of the Nassau County and State Democratic committees, Jay Jacobs. Jacobs has been on a crusade to wipe the Green Party off of New York ballots. I don’t want to hear anymore hypocritical crocodile tears from anti-democratic Democrats like Jacobs about Republican attacks on voting rights. Party suppression is a form of voter suppression. It’s what authoritarian governments do. It is what Jacobs and the Democratic Party are doing,” said Howie Hawkins, the Green Party candidate for Governor.

Hawkins' running mate for Lt. Governor, Gloria Mattera, said, “Hochul, Jacobs, and the Democratic establishment are afraid of competition from their left. They know that the Greens’ progressive program of state-level Medicare-for-All, a real Green New Deal, taxing the rich, and affordable housing is more popular than their corporate program of privatized health care, fossil-fueled cryptomining, a billion for the Buffalo Bills billionaire, and rent hikes and evictions for landlords. They want to keep the Green Party off the ballot so that voters don’t have a progressive alternative to vote for.”

As a member of the 2019 Public Financing Commission, Jacobs pushed through highly restrictive ballot access requirements along with the public campaign financing proposal the commission was charged with developing. The New York Times called it “The Democrats' Secret Plan To Kill Third Parties in New York.”

That law was overturned in court for being beyond the commission’s power to enact. But with Jacobs cheerleading, then Gov. Cuomo pushed the ballot access restrictions law through as part of the April 2020 budget package while the legislature was only meeting virtually during the Covid lockdown.

The new restrictions doubled the frequency that parties must qualify for the ballot from gubernatorial races every four years to both presidential and gubernatorial races every two years. The votes needed to secure a ballot line were increased from 50,000 to 130,000 or 2%, whichever is greater. In the 2020 presidential race, 2% came to over 173,000 votes, or three and a half times more than the old requirement. As a result, every party that did not cross-endorse Biden or Trump lost their ballot line.

The petition signature requirement to get back on to the ballot was tripled from 15,000 to 45,000. That requirement is the most difficult in the nation because there are only 42 days to collect the signatures. Most states have no time limit on collecting ballot access petition signatures. Richard Winger of Ballot Access News has noted that "in 2020, not one independent candidate, and not one minor party, successfully completed any petition anywhere in the nation that exceeded 5,000 signatures, for any office.”

Adding to the burden of petitioning this year was the outbreak of two new Covid Omicron variants as petitioning started in late April and the Centers for Disease Control recommended indoor masking in most upstate counties. New York State made no reductions in signature requirements to compensate for the Covid pandemic as it did in 2020. Despite petitioning with a face mask and hand sanitizer in his back pocket, "Many people didn’t want to come near me and my petition clipboard because of the Covid outbreak," said Hawkins of Syracuse, which was the April epicenter of the new Omicron wave.

Jacobs and Cuomo both said after the 2020 election that eliminating all but the Conservative and Working Families parties, the fusion parties that normally cross-endorse major party candidates, was their objective all along. Jacobs said he wanted to eliminate “transactional parties.” The Greens contend that the transactional parties are the fusion parties that cut deals with the major parties in return for their ballot lines. The Green Party runs its own candidates independently of both major parties.

“Not being on the ballot hurts us, but it will not stop us,” Hawkins said. “We will be fighting to change these exclusionary ballot access laws and for inclusionary election reforms, including ranked choice voting for statewide offices and proportional representation in the state legislature. We want to make New York an inclusive multi-party democracy.”

Green Party of New York
July 27, 2020

Green Party and Libertarian Party File Joint Lawsuit Fighting Ballot Access Restrictions

Albany, New York, July 27, 2020 – The Green Party of New York (GPNY) and the Libertarian Party of New York (LPNY) filed a Federal lawsuit today in the Southern District of New York to invalidate restrictive ballot access provisions passed as a rider to the FY2021 State Budget.

Since 1936, minor political parties in New York have been required to obtain 50,000 votes for their gubernatorial candidate every four years in order to achieve and maintain ballot status. The GPNY achieved ballot status in 2010, and has since maintained it, while the LPNY achieved ballot status in 2018.

In an act of blatant political retribution against the Working Families Party (WFP), Governor Cuomo’s hand-picked “Public Campaign Finance Commission,” led by state Democratic Party Chair Jay Jacobs, recommended in December 2019 that not only should the requirement to achieve and maintain ballot access be increased from 50,000 votes to the greater of 130,000 votes or two percent of votes cast, but also that the qualifications should occur every two years, at the gubernatorial and presidential elections. At the same time, signature requirements for independent nominating petitions were recommended to be increased threefold. After the legislature declined to modify the recommendations, they automatically became law twenty days later. Ultimately, the legislature’s abdication of its law-making powers to this executive commission caused a NYS Supreme Court judge in Western New York to declare the commission and all its actions unconstitutional. Bent on settling political scores, and under the cover of the COVID-19 crisis, Governor Cuomo and the legislature subsequently re-enacted the ballot access provisions in Part ZZZ of the FY2021 State Budget, leaving minor political parties in NYS facing an uncertain future.

The lawsuit filed today by attorneys James Ostrowski and Michael Kuzma on behalf of the GPNY and LPNY names NYS Board of Elections Co-Chairs Peter Kosinski and Douglas Kellner, Commissioner Andrew Spano, and Co-Executive Directors Todd Valentine and Robert Brehm as Defendants. The complaint alleges infringement upon First and Fourteenth Amendment rights to organize, identify, and vote for minor parties under the United States Constitution, and that the new voter and petitioning requirements are therefore unconstitutional.

"Whatever justification they may use for it, the choice by Gov. Cuomo and the Legislature to create new and onerous ballot-access thresholds this year is clearly designed to eliminate any threat of competition, preserve the state's anemic and uncompetitive electoral system, and satisfy their corporate paymasters. The Green Party stands with all other affected political parties, as well as the voters of New York State, who deserve a robust and expansive democracy," said Peter LaVenia, co-chair of the GPNY.

Anthony D'Orazio, chair of the LPNY added, "Under cover of the COVID-19 pandemic and the already byzantine New York State budget process, the Governor and his advisors decided to destroy political competition in New York and preserve power for the two major parties. The Libertarian Party stands with all minor political parties of New York in fighting against such tyranny."

For more information about the Green Party of New York, visit Facebook at www.facebook.com/GreenPartyNY, Twitter @GPNY, or their website, gpny.org.

For more information about the Libertarian Party of New York, visit Facebook at www.facebook.com/LPNYOfficial, Twitter @LPNYOfficial, Instagram @LPNYOfficial, or their website, lpny.org.