By Marilyn Odendahl
The Indiana Citizen
August 16, 2024
The Green Party convention will culminate Saturday with the selection of the nominees for president and vice president, but, come November, Hoosiers will not see those names on their ballots.
Although a Green Party campaign official estimated his team collected at least 55,000 signatures of Indiana voters – well over the nearly 37,000 signatures independent and minor-party candidates need for ballot access in the state – less than half were verified. So the Green Party will not appear on the Indiana ballot and, under state law, any write-in votes for the party’s nominee will not be counted because the party opted to petition to get on the ballot, rather than file the paperwork necessary to be a write-in candidate.
Jason Call, a member of the Green Party from the state of Washington who helped lead the petition effort in Indiana, said the failure to field a candidate in the Hoosier state is a disappointment and prevents voters from getting the choice they want.
“It’s very much a rigged game in terms of getting on the ballot in Indiana and pretty much everywhere else,” Call said. “We really feel like that’s not representative democracy.”
The electorate’s appetite for independent and third-party candidates has been and remains very strong. A 2023 Gallup survey asked U.S. adults whether they believed the Republican or Democratic parties do an adequate job of representing the American people or do they do such a poor job that a third major party is needed? The results showed 63% said a third party was needed and just 34% said the two major parties were doing an adequate job. This is the highest response in favor of a third party since Gallup began asking the question in 2003, but it is not “meaningfully different” from the 61% and 62% responses in 2017 and 2021, respectively.
However, despite the support for an alternative to Republicans and Democrats, no independent or third-party candidate has ever won a presidential election. Moreover, a 2024 study by the Pew Research Center found the excitement for minor-party contenders tends to wane as the campaigns continue. And by Election Day, their vote totals are often lower than what the polls suggested.
In 2016, New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson ran as the Libertarian presidential candidate, and physician and political activist Jill Stein ran that year as the Green Party candidate. The Pew study noted that while polls showed Johnson got support from 8% to 12% of registered voters, he received only 3.3% of the popular vote and Stein’s support eroded from a high of 7% to settling at just over 1% of the vote on Election Day.
Marjorie Hershey, Indiana University professor emeritus of political science, is not surprised to see voters taking an interest in independent and third-party candidates. The Republican and Democratic parties, she said, cannot represent all the views in this very diverse country, so the minor candidates provide a “safety valve” by advocating for and taking positions on issues that otherwise might not gain any attention in an election.
Even so, Hershey is doubtful any independent or third-party candidate will be moving into the White House in January 2025.
“It can make an interesting story,” Hershey said of third-party contenders, “but what’s most important in the story is how incredibly rare these folks are and how incredibly unsuccessful they are.”
The Robert F. Kennedy Jr. presidential campaign has been successfully petitioning to get on the November ballot as an independent in several states, including Indiana. During a recent media call, Kennedy and key members of his campaign were upbeat about his chances in November.
Lane Koch, Midwest regional director for the Kennedy campaign, said in an interview with The Indiana Citizen that the team sees a path to winning the 270 electoral votes needed to get to the White House. While she conceded winning the deep red state of Indiana will be difficult, she said the campaign is not giving up. Her team, she said, is shifting its focus from getting on the ballot in Indiana to winning the election by contacting voters through phone banks and at community events to encourage them to turn out for Kennedy on Election Day.
Buoying the Kennedy campaign’s effort is the growing number of Americans who identify politically as an independent, Koch said. A Gallup poll in 2023 found an average of 43% of U.S. adults called themselves independents, making them the largest political bloc in the country.
“The tide is changing,” Koch said. “We’re showing that we are really viable. We’re going to be on the ballot in every state. We’ve got a really unifying message and so much positive news coming.”
Hershey said she does not think the attention independent and third-party candidates are getting is a consequence of the country’s deep political divisiveness. In fact, she said, the United States has never had a “golden age” where everyone agreed and, currently, the country is no more politically polarized now than it was 50 years ago.
What has happened is that America has become “perhaps one of the most varied populations” in the world, Hershey said. The viewpoints and perspectives are so diversified that while we might have widespread consensus on certain issues, like the need for a strong education system, she said, the agreement breaks down when we start getting into the details, such as should charter schools be funded with public money.
Ironically, she said, the two major political parties have become more rigid in their ideologies. In the past, while conservatives and liberals could be part of either party, now the parties are not as diverse.
“The Republicans are much more consistently conservative and the Democrats are more or less consistently liberal,” Hershey said. “And that means that people who don’t consider themselves either conservative or liberal, who are someplace in the middle – although there aren’t a whole lot of those – sort of wonder where they can go.”
Call believes many voters would be attracted to the Green Party once they learn about the party’s platform. The Greens are opposed to the war in Gaza, he said, characterizing it as a genocide, but also, the party advocates for free tuition at public colleges, increasing the minimum wage, fixing the housing crisis through rent control and more public housing, and making health care and prescription drugs affordable.
Although the Green Party’s positions may resonate with many voters, casting a ballot for a third-party candidate who probably will not win during an election year where the presidency will likely be decided by a slim margin is another matter. When asked how a Green Party president would be able to push any of the party’s agenda through a Congress that would not have any – let along a majority – of Green Party members, Call said the answer was easy – the will of the people would prevail.
The way the Green Party gets into the White House is by a “groundswell of public support,” Call said. “That means that the people support the policies we are promoting and the people will then look at Congress and say, ‘we elected this president for a reason and you are not going to block what the people want.’”
Being on the ballot is key to winning the presidency and, as Hershey pointed out, independent or third-party candidates have high hurdles to clear in that regard. The electoral system “heavily favors” the Republican and Democratic parties, she said, through a series of rules that make getting on the ballot especially difficult, particularly in Indiana. On top of the state’s restrictions, the country has a winner-takes-all election system, so any third-party candidate has to get a majority of the votes to win office. In other democracies, a proportional representation model is in place, allowing minor parties to pick up a seat or two in a governing body and sometimes become part of a ruling coalition government, even if they do not get the most votes.
“Any state that has had strong party organizations, over time has typically been able to keep the ballot access requirements very high for anybody other than Democrats and Republicans,” Hershey said.
Both Call and Koch said Indiana’s requirements for independent and minor-party candidates were burdensome and created barriers to ballot access. They pointed, in particular, to the logistical problems created by having to deliver the signed petitions to the county clerks by noon on the deadline day and then being responsible for retrieving the petitions when the clerks have finished with the signature verification process and driving them to the Indiana secretary of state’s office in Indianapolis.
Koch noted one area of concern in the petition process was Indiana’s lack of an identification requirement, an irony in a state that enacted one of the first and strictest voter ID laws in the country. When retrieving the signed petitions from the county clerks’ offices, she said, the candidate’s representatives did not have to show any ID or validate who they were, so she worries that anyone could get the petitions and throw them in the trash, potentially scuttling the effort to get on the ballot.
Also, Call said the overlap of deadlines for submitting petitions and filing as a write-in candidate can force parties to make difficult and uninformed decisions. In July, as the signed petitions were still being reviewed by the county clerks, he said, when the Green Party had to decide if it wanted to submit the paperwork to be a write-in candidate. Doing so, he said, would have stopped the petition verification process, preventing the party from appearing on the ballot.
The Green Party opted to stay in the petition process, Call said, because the team did not want to throw away all the work put into collecting the signatures.
In the aftermath of falling short, Call said the Green Party plans to review the petitions to determine why so many signatures were rejected. He suspects the problem may be that registered voters signed petitions in counties in which they did not live, so even though they are eligible to vote, their signatures were tossed because the clerks could not find them on the county’s voter rolls.
“That’s been the reason that we lost out on this,” Call said of not getting on the Indiana ballot. “We need to take that evidence and we need to say (to the legislature), ‘hey, voters are expressing their wills and you’re setting a barrier in front of them that is not permitting them to get the choice that they want. That’s undemocratic.’”
Dwight Adams, an editor and writer based in Indianapolis, edited this article. He has been a content editor, copy editor and digital producer at The Indianapolis Star and IndyStar.com, and a planner for other papers, including the Louisville Courier Journal.
The Indiana Citizen is a nonpartisan, nonprofit platform dedicated to increasing the number of informed and engaged Hoosier citizens. We are operated by the Indiana Citizen Education Foundation, Inc., a 501(c)(3) public charity. For questions about the story, contact Marilyn Odendahl at marilyn.odendahl@indianacitizen.org.
