As fraud investigation continues, Green Party sues to get on NC ballots

The North Carolina Green Party filed a federal lawsuit Thursday against the State Board of Elections, asking a judge to force party candidates onto the ballot in North Carolina despite an ongoing investigation into fraudulent signatures that election officials say abound in the party’s required paperwork.

Pat Gannon, a spokesman for the state elections board, said the board is reviewing the Green Party’s complaint, which was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina. The board didn't provide additional comment.

The Green Party needed 13,865 of those signatures to satisfy state law, and officials thought they had more than 15,900 valid ones because that’s how many county election officials across the state initially signed off on. But a deeper investigation from state and local election officials raised a number of questions, particularly with signatures collected by two people that the State Board says “submitted known fraudulent signatures.”

Those two people were hired by a consultant out of Arkansas, but they also worked directly for the Green Party in North Carolina. State investigators say they haven’t been able to reach them.

Some of the paperwork those collectors turned in “may contain thousands of fraudulent signatures,” Karen Brinson Bell, the state’s elections director, told North Carolina State Board of Elections members Thursday during an update on the ongoing criminal investigation.

If the liberal Green Party and its U.S. Senate candidate, Matthew Hoh, are added to the ballot this year, that could sap votes from the Democratic Party’s Senate nominee in what could be a close election. That election may ultimately determine party control of the U.S. Senate.

But state officials say their own inquiries are separate from efforts by the law firm, the Elias Law Group, which reviewed Green Party petitions and produced affidavits or declarations from at least 145 people who said they wanted their signatures removed.

In the lawsuit, Green Party officials say the State Board of Elections has not presented evidence of “the purported irregularities” in the party’s petitions. Brinson Bell told elections board members Thursday that the staff investigation continues and that she has asked county boards to report back with new findings by July 29.

Those local boards of election were required to compare petition signatures with voter signatures they have on file as part of the initial validation process. Not all of them did, Brinson Bell said Thursday.

Once counties certify that they’ve done so, state officials plan to update the Green Party’s total signature count, she said. So far counties have found signatures to subtract and signatures that should have been validated the first time around, State Board of Elections General Counsel Katelyn Love said Thursday.

A mid-August deadline looms to decide the matter. That’s when the state plans to print paper ballots. But the July 1 deadline to certify new political parties through the petition process has passed. The elections board voted on June 30 to leave the Green Party off the ballot.

The vote was 3-2, a party-line decision, with the board's Democratic majority voting not to certify. Democratic board members have since said they're willing to allow the party on the ballot if enough signatures are ultimately validated, but there were too many questions to vote that way late last month.