We got petitions ready to go. We are ready for you to step up and create a public face for the Georgia Green Party in your community. With your help, Green Party candidates can get on the Georgia ballot in 2018. Below is a link to our 2018 petition, along with guidance on its effective use.
For a bit of context, the officers and state committee continue to explore litigation and legislative strategies to build on our victory last year in Federal Court, which provide the first break-through in Georgia’s ballot access regime since 1982, when the 5% rule was bifurcated to provide for a 1% standard for state-wide ballot access. That was thirty-five years ago.
In North Carolina a change to the law was just enacted which will for the first time make it possible for the Green Party to put its candidates on the ballot in that state. You will hear more in the weeks to follow about opportunities to engage with us at the state Capitol in the next session.
But we will have nothing to discuss with legislators in January, unless we are also building a campaign which seeks to comply with the existing ballot access regime governing access by Green candidates to the Georgia ballot.
We are urging Greens across Georgia to devote at least one day, between now and the close of polls, 7:00 pm, Tuesday, November 7th, 2017 and commit it to collecting petition signatures for our state-wide slate. We are creating a new Facebook group specific to the 2018 petition drive, where folks are encouraged to document your local ballot access efforts with reports and photographs, raw signature counts, tactical assessments about what works and what does not, questions about the process and anything else relevant to putting Green Party candidates on the ballot in Georgia in 2018.
Party officers are already in conversation with candidates interested in seeking the Party’s nomination in 2018. As they prepare to publicly launch their campaigns, there is work we can do as a Party to prepare the way. The clock is ticking towards our ballot access deadline and your party needs you to step up at this time. Not everyone can run for office this year. But we can all carry a petition.
For folks living in or near to municipalities holding local elections this year, please consider taking Tuesday, the 7th off from work to staff a polling place, finding a place 150′ from the building where you can engage voters and ask them to sign your ballot access petition. If you are out there campaigning for your local candidate, and if asked whether your local candidate is endorsed by the Greens, simply be clear, that while the Party has not considered that question, that this particular Green (that would be you) does.
If that does not make sense, give your party a day of your labor this coming weekend, perhaps find a festival or fair or queue you can work. Lines outside of nightclubs, sidewalks in your town square, the community rooms in your dorm, the potluck after church, all of these make excellent opportunities to engage Georgia voters, collecting their signatures to put Greens on the Georgia ballot.
This is the latest petition:
If you have never circulated a petition before, I urge that you take a look at this next link as well. Judging from the email address and phone numbers, this is from perhaps 1998 or 1999. Please ignore those old numbers and address, as no longer relevant. But otherwise the advice on how to effectively circulate a ballot access petition is solid. Only change is that we are now asked to collect birth dates as well.
Remember, print only on legal size paper, with the affidavit on the back of every petition, collect signatures from only ONE-COUNTY-PER-PAGE and handle your petition in such a way you are ready to face a perjury accusation over your signature on the affidavit.
http://www.greens.org/georgia.static/pdf/HowToCirculate.pdf
