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.   Continue reading

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: Continue reading