Progressive Politics

Matthew Hoh comes to mind. He was a Green Party candidate whose campaign was astroturfed insanely hard. He got booted off the ballot because hundreds of signatures from his party's petition campaign got thrown out for being fraudulent.

Upon discovering the fraudulent signatures, the North Carolina Democratic party and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, Hoh's party recognition was denied by the NC State Board of Elections. The Green Party later sued the NC SBoE. While this was happening, the DSCC started contacting voters who signed the Green Party's petition and urged them to vote for the Democrats.

Some key points:

• During the initial audit of signatures (standard for all potential candidates), a sample of the entire signature roll is taken and assessed. When the Green Party's signatures were audited, there was a high enough percentage of blatantly fraudulent signatures and other irregularities (i.e. made up addresses) to result in a disqualification.

• Matthew Hoh and the NC Green Party appealed the NC SBoE's decision, claiming that the amount of disputed signatures wouldn't be enough to reduce their total signatures to a point that didn't meet the minimum threshold

• Hoh and the Green Party succeeded in court and also sued the DCSS for their lawsuit. This is where I call BS for a number of reasons, the main one being the court's explanation for why Hoh's appeal succeeded. They essentially agreed with the Green Party's assertion that even if you removed the disputed signatures, they would meet the minimum threshold to be on the NC ballot.

• This was NOT the damn reason they were disqualified in the first place. The NC SBoE initially disqualified them because the percentage of signatures deemed to be fraudulent met the threshold for disqualification. Part of why the DCSS called out the Green Party so hard was that there were too many coincidences. The repeat signatures that were "accidents" (how? how does that "accidentally" happen?), the missing addresses that were filled out by staffers... So the appellate court decision didn't even contradict the initial NC SBoE disqualification reasoning and instead, a completely new, irrelevant argument was made and accepted.

• The petitioning firm chosen by the Green Party was owned and operated by a man with a documented history of fraud-- Shawn Wilmoth. Wilmoth pled guilty to election fraud in 2011 in Virginia, and in 2022 he was being investigated for election fraud in Michigan. There's ignorance and then there's wilful ignorance with malicious intent, and I'm convinced this is the latter.

Source: NC Local news-- check The News & Observer. I'm exhausted today but everything I wrote above has been covered in detail by News Observer, with sources/citations. I don't normally waste my time going down rabbit holes like this but there were way too many weirdo red flags to ignore when that election was gearing up. The astroturfing on reddit and YouTube was so shameless.

edit: Another thing. The signatures for these petitions are often publicly accessible. If you check Green Party signatures, you'll notice a pattern of fraudulent signatures. The documents are usually available as PDFs.

Edit: Is there a way to disable replies? I am interested in discussing this further but just not today and I don't want to be bothered with notifications about this. It was so damn exhausting when it initially happened because I had to deal with so many gullible people rabidly defending the Green Party and completely ignoring the fraud.

Edit 2: I'll give an example:

• Let's say my local election says I need 1000 signatures to qualify on the ballot, and that if 10% of my signatures are deemed fraudulent, I will be disqualified. If I get 5000 signatures and it turns out 1500 of them are fraudulent, the local election rules would result in my disqualification because more than 10% of my votes were fraudulent. This was essentially the NC State Board of Elections' reasoning for Matthew Hoh's initial disqualification.

• The appeal that Hoh and the Green Party won, was based on reasoning that effectively excludes any consideration with respect to a high volume of fraudulent signatures being an indicator of an illegitimate candidate. Instead, the appellate court basically said "Forget the 1500 fraudulent signatures-- those are gone, we don't care about that. What we care about are the remaining 3500 signatures-- 3500 is 2500 more than the minimum threshold, so you actually DID qualify". It makes absolutely no sense and every time Matthew Hoh parades around this trash-tier appellate court decision, he conveniently omits any discussion regarding the stupidly blatant signatures that were forged, or the fact that the petitioning firm his party chose just happens to be pretty well-versed in election fraud.

Last point before I go to sleep:

https://www.michigan.gov/ag/news/press-releases/2024/06/13/signature-collection-campaign-fraud-defendants-to-face-trial

Signature Collection Campaign Fraud Defendants to Face Trial

^ This is the same guy that Matthew Hoh and the North Carolina Green Party went with when they chose a petitioning firm. They knew what they were doing and this isn't his first rodeo with election fraud. Wilmoth isn't being charged in relation to any Green Party candidates in the USA despite the Green Party spending loads of money on his petitioning firm. Why wouldn't they want their money back? Because they know the moment they're told to hand over their communications/records/etc., the fraud will become even more apparent. Their constituents should be fuming about their Green Party donations being pissed away on a company that lead to the party being accused of fraud, and yet... crickets. Why?

The U.S. District Court determined that some of the actions of those two Democratic Party bodies was “frivolous, unreasonable, and without foundation”, so the Democrats must pay $6 525 to the Green Party’s attorney. Green Party of North Carolina v North Carolina State Board of Elections source

The Democratic Party lost this case in court, but the damage had already been done.

Check my reply below.

https://www.newsobserver.com/ <-- everything I said in my comment is covered on article's in this NC news outlet. They have about 5 articles that cover what I wrote and their journalists do a good job providing sources/citations.

tl;dr Matthew Hoh and the NC Green Party got caught hiring a petitioning firm with a long reputation of election fraud and hundreds of petition signatures were thrown out for being fraudulent. Dems went HAM and called all the people whose names were on the signature list, urging them to vote for Dems instead of Greens. Hoh and the Green Party get disqualified by the NC State Board of Elections (SBoE) for fraudulent signatures, and they appeal it.

Fast forward and now their disqualification was successfully appealed and the NC SBoE now accepts them on the (now expired) ballot. What changed? Well... the criteria for why they were disqualified, apparently. The NC SBoE initially disqualified the Green Party after a sampling of signatures revealed a percentage of fraudulent signatures and irregularities that would meet the threshold for disqualification. In the appeals court, they basically said "okay okay so SOME of the signatures were blatantly fraudulent and yes you just happened to have hired a petitioning firm with a long history of election fraud, BUT none of that matters because excluding the disputed signatures, you still meet the minimum level of signatures required to be on the ballot." The appeal succeeds, Green Party then cites that in order to successfully sue the DSCC, and they claim vindication while saying jack shit about the fraudulent signatures.

Now ask yourself, does that make any fucking sense? To me, it makes no sense whatsoever and it reeks of political fuckery by a party with a long history of trying to siphon votes from Dems so they can be useful idiots for Republicans.