Have you ever thought about running for office? 

Even if you haven’t, consider the following: more and more people are ready for a grassroots uprising against the political establishment. For years, national polls have shown that roughly 60% of Americans - and over 70% of millennials - agree that the establishment parties are failing us, and that we need a new major party.

With 2021 Spring elections coming up, now is a great time to think about running for office as a Green to help build the movement for people, planet and peace over profit.

If you'd consider running for office, let us know and we'll get in touch to discuss the possibilities!

We had a virtual Green Campaign School on Saturday December 19th for prospective candidates, campaign managers, and anyone who would like to gain the skills and knowledge needed to be an essential part of a successful campaign.

The Wisconsin Green Party 2020 Fall Gathering was a spirited meeting that showed the resolve of Greens to keep building in Wisconsin despite all the attacks on us by the political establishment this year.

While the pandemic and economic crisis have brought hardship to many and created obstacles to grassroots activity, the continued failure of the system means Greens still have plentiful opportunities to organize for a better way forward.

Congratulations to our new officers elected at the Fall Gathering: Co-chair Jo’ Nathan Kingfisher, Operations Treasurer Bill Breihan, Elections Treasurer Patti Ashby, Recording Secretary Sam Michael, Corresponding Secretary Jeffrey Lewis, and our new Coordinating Council members: Sam Chance in Congressional District 2, Cody Arendt in CD-3, Tom Rodman in CD-4, Bruce Hinkforth in CD-5, Tomas Ward in CD-6, and Barbara Dahlgren in an at-large seat. For the Green Party US National Committee, Dave Schwab and Tom Rodman were elected as delegates, and Mike McCallister and Monte Letourneau as alternates.

Join us for the Wisconsin Green Party 2020 Fall Gathering on Saturday November 14, 2020 with special guests Howie Hawkins, Lisa Savage, and Angela Walker!

Right now, countless people are wondering: what's next after the 2020 election? With the corporate two-party system sure to keep failing our country, it's critical that we come together to build a people-powered alternative.

We'll be joined for this important discussion by special guests Howie Hawkins, 2020 Green Party Presidential candidate, Angela Walker, 2020 VP candidate and Milwaukee native, and Lisa Savage, 2020 candidate for US Senate in Maine's historic ranked-choice voting election.

Click here for more information on the Wisconsin Green Party 2020 Fall Gathering and how to RSVP!

The Four Lakes Green Party has released the following statement:

We, the Four Lakes Green Party, stand in solidarity with all those demonstrating for racial justice and striking against the disease of systemic racism and white supremacy infecting Wisconsin, and particularly Dane County. We call on Dane County to halt the jail-building project that exemplifies the perpetuation of systemic racism, and to redirect our resources from racist mass incarceration to investing in the well-being of historically oppressed communities.

You can still vote for Green Party Presidential and VP candidates Howie Hawkins and Angela Walker in Wisconsin by writing in your vote, even after the political establishment kept their names off the state ballot. Here's how:

At the top of your ballot under "President/Vice President", find and fill in the bubble next to the write-in field below the other candidates, write "Howie Hawkins" on the "write-in (President)" line, and write "Angela Walker" on the "write-in (Vice President)" line. Examples:

That's it! If you're voting by mail, make sure to have a witness sign your envelope.

After all the efforts to suppress our votes this year, we want to make sure all our write-in votes are counted, so if you plan to write-in your vote for Howie Hawkins and Angela Walker, please sign our WI Green vote pledge now (you can sign the vote pledge without your name being public). We can use this information about how many people plan to write in a Green vote, and where they live, to hold election officials accountable for counting our votes.

This July, a courageous band of Wisconsin Green Party supporters braved the risk of contracting COVID-19 to get our presidential ticket of Howie Hawkins and Angela Walker on the ballot. We turned in 3,966 signatures of Wisconsinites who supported putting a Green choice on the ballot, almost double the minimum requirement. 

On Monday, the Wisconsin Supreme Court upheld a concerted effort by Democratic Party operatives to overturn the will of those Wisconsin voters, and the hard work of those volunteers.

After trampling our rights, the Democrats are trying to cover the shame of this blatant voter suppression by vilifying the Green Party, aided and abetted by the corporate media.

We’re not lying down and we’re not giving up, but we need your help to fight back. 

If you support our long, hard fight for real democracy in the United States, please contribute now to support grassroots Green organizing and campaigns in 2021 and 2022, and sign up to volunteer to build the party for people, planet, and peace over profit!

So here’s what happened: 

From the Howie Hawkins/Angela Walker campaign:

September 14, 2020 - Green Party nominees for President and Vice President, Howie Hawkins and Angela Walker, rejected the decision handed down earlier today by the Wisconsin Supreme Court, to deny placing them on the November 2020 ballot.  The Green Party has been on the ballot in Wisconsin for every presidential election since 1996.

Several years ago, the workers of Wisconsin occupied the state capitol building with shouts of “this is what democracy looks like.”  Angela Walker mobilized her Milwaukee transit workers local union into that defense of workers’ rights.  Unfortunately, today, the state Supreme Court demonstrated something completely different from what most people consider to be democracy: a choice on their ballot.

“The court majority failed to recognize the partisan Wisconsin Election Commission’s repeated unlawful actions, said Andrea Mérida, campaign manager.” Mérida continued, “now we have a dangerous precedent where a major party can effectively decide which minor parties can participate in elections, by conjuring up arbitrary requirements on the fly to remove its opposition. Regardless, the fact remains that we met all of the legal requirements for ballot access and followed the WEC’s instructions to the letter with regards to Angela Walker’s change of residence.”

“We were screwed. As the dissenting opinion explains, the actual facts and the law show that we are qualified for the ballot. Partisan hacks should not be running elections for their own parties. They set up the absentee ballot snafu. The decision is a travesty of justice,” said Hawkins.

“Our campaign rejects the idea that we should be punished for what the court majority considers an untimely legal response.  As noted in the dissenting opinion, our campaign filed only two days after the Commission certified their list of independent candidates.  As a working-class campaign that cannot afford attorneys on retainer, unlike the two major parties, it takes time for us to find legal representation, formulate a response and file documents,” Angela Walker said.

The campaign is currently weighing out its legal options, and Wisconsinites may now have to write-in Howie Hawkins and Angela Walker in order to vote for the only presidential ticket that fights for a Green New Deal, Medicare for All, and fair elections and ballot access. The campaign vows to continue to fight alongside the Wisconsin Green Party to regain its ballot status, which will require one percent of the statewide vote, or about 20,000 votes.

This July, a courageous band of Wisconsin Green Party (WIGP) volunteers braved the risk of contracting COVID-19 to get our presidential ticket of Howie Hawkins and Milwaukee’s Angela Walker on the ballot. We turned in 3966 signatures of Wisconsinites who wanted the choice to vote Green, almost double the minimum requirement. 

On Monday, the Wisconsin Supreme Court invalidated the voices of those Wisconsinites, and the hard work of those volunteers, in favor of an expedient solution.

The Green Party has long fought for voters’ rights, including the 2016 recount effort that brought unprecedented transparency to our flawed voting system and resulted in unreliable voting machines being decertified, with a comprehensive investigation of voting machine source code still pending in the courts. The Wisconsin Green Party did not delay the printing of 2020 ballots, although the state’s dubious bureaucratic maneuvering in the face of pending ballot access lawsuits nearly did. The Democratic Party members of the Wisconsin Election Commission refused to accept the signatures of qualified, eligible voters we turned in. Why? Because Angela Walker moved in July.

WIGP Co-Chair Dave Schwab said: “When you break it down in plain English: we submitted 3966 valid signatures of people who supported Howie and Angela being on the ballot for President and VP. Why should the fact that she moved from one apartment to another in the same town in South Carolina during the campaign disqualify not just her, but Howie too, from running for national office?”

This disqualification was the last, successful barrier placed in front of the WIGP and Hawkins/Walker campaign, but the WEC made it harder than it should be, as the dissenters to this decision pointed out. The Republican and Democratic duopoly will always collaborate to keep political outsiders out. This is one reason why almost half of eligible voters in the US don’t vote.

WIGP will mount a vigorous write-in campaign for the Hawkins/Walker ticket over the next 49 days, with the goal to win at least one percent of the statewide presidential vote. Reaching this goal will ensure that Wisconsin voters will have a pro-worker, pro-climate, pro-democracy alternative to the corrupt corporate duopoly.

From the Howie Hawkins/Angela Walker campaign:

September 14 - The Green Party candidates for president and vice-president are demanding that the Wisconsin Supreme Court put them on the ballot today.

“The court should have made a decision by now. We want a decision today to put us on the ballot. We want the absentee ballot process to proceed without further delay,” said Howie Hawkins, the Green presidential candidate.

The delay in the printing of the absentee ballots that are supposed to be mailed out by September 17 was precipitated by objections by Democratic members of the Wisconsin Elections Commission (WEC). WEC staff certified that over 3,000 signatures on the Greens’ ballot petitions were from qualified voters, well over the 2,000 required.

From the Howie Hawkins/Angela Walker 2020 campaign:

Well, we finally made the mainstream media, but while 2016 was all about slandering Stein/Baraka as Russian assets, this year it's that Howie and Angela are tools of the Republican Party that are denying people in Wisconsin their absentee ballots.

Nothing could be further from the truth.  The Green Party's track record as being the party of election integrity is clear.  We are the ones regularly pressing for integrity from elections authorities around the country.  We are the ones pushing to replace bad voting machines with auditable paper ballots and ending voter suppression via racist voter ID laws and party suppression.

The simple solution in Wisconsin is for the Democrats to immediately stop playing games and using delaying tactics to prevent voters from being able to support third-party candidates, get new ballots printed that include Howie and Angela as a choice, and send them out. Both major parties collude to boost their own electoral chances in a myriad of ways and deny voters' and candidates' major rights.

So what exactly is happening in Wisconsin?  Here's a quick run-down: