Organizers for independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and for the Maryland Green Party said they each submitted thousands more signatures than the 10,000 needed Monday to earn a place on this fall’s ballot.
The petitions still must be certified by elections officials, but organizers said they are confident.
The Green Party said it submitted 16,727 signatures by Monday’s deadline to qualify a handful of its candidates who are running for election this fall, in addition to having itself recertified as a party that can put forward candidates through 2026.
“We feel confident that we turned enough in to make it this time, but we also feel confident that if we don’t, we’ll certainly be on [the ticket] for 2026,” said Andy Ellis, a member of the Maryland Green Party ballot access committee.
The Kennedy campaign said it submitted 26,000 signatures to get him on the ballot in Maryland, part of an uphill fight to earn a place on the ballot in all 50 states.
Kennedy’s team did not directly provide comment and instead referred questions to its ballot access page and a YouTube ballot access press briefing video. But in its press release, Maryland State Director Josh Mazer said Kennedy would be good for Maryland as president.
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“Kennedy will be a great president for not only Marylanders but all Americans,” Mazer said. “His track record on the environment demonstrates his commitment to protecting the planet and human health.”
The petitions are just one step in the process to get on the ballot. Once the petitions are filed, the State Board of Elections has 20 days to review them, said State Administrator of Elections Jared DeMarinis, then local boards verify the numbers and reports back to the state board.
DeMarinis also said there are multiple reasons why a petition would be rendered invalid.
“There’s a whole bunch of reasons,” DeMarinis said. “It could be the circulator forgot to sign, the circulator forgot to date, the circulator’s date that he attested that he witnessed all these signatures is a different date than the date of a signature on the page, you can’t sign a petition twice.”
Kennedy is on the ballot in 15 states and his campaign has submitted petitions in 22 other states, including Maryland, according to a campaign statement. It also said it has enough signatures for ballot access in six more states.
The Green Party petition aims to get presidential candidate Jill Stein on the ballot, in addition to party candidates for three other Maryland races: Claudia Barber for circuit court judge in Anne Arundel County, Nancy Wallace for the U.S. House of Representatives against Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-8th), and Renaud Brown for Baltimore City Council District 14 against Councilmember Odette Ramos.
Ellis mentioned that the name standards petition signatures are extremely strict, requiring a full first name, middle initial and last name, all of which need to match with the voter identification information. He mentioned all of the work that goes into gathering signatures in the first place, things like heat exhaustion and a small number of people managing a large number of people.
“So we do fairs and festivals where we have tables. We have people walking through farmer’s markets, we had a couple of paid volunteers working at different points,” he said. “It’s a brutal process gathering signatures, it’s manual, it’s been hot this summer, we’ve had people have really serious health problems.”
by Elijah Pittman, Maryland Matters
August 5, 2024
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