The state Supreme Court, just three days after getting the case, gave the Green Party until Friday to respond to a suit seeking to keep it from placing a candidate on Wisconsin’s presidential ballot.
In her dissent from Thursday’s order, conservative Justice Rebecca Bradley accused the majority of “bending over backwards to expedite” the suit filed by a staffer with the Democratic National Committee.
The short deadline comes as the Elections Commission is scheduled to meet Tuesday to consider the petitions of third-party presidential candidates seeking to qualify for the Wisconsin ballot. That will kick off a tight timeline for county clerks to take the list of certified candidates and get ballots printed before they start going out next month to those who want to vote absentee.
The court issued two orders in the suit that it received Monday calling for the justices to find the Green Party doesn’t meet the qualifications under state law to place a presidential candidate on Wisconsin’s ballot.
One set a 5 p.m. deadline Friday for the Wisconsin Green Party and the state Elections Commission to respond to the suit as the named defendants. The court also gave other parties until 5 p.m. Friday to file proposed briefs if they want justices to consider their arguments in the case.
Bradley, joined in her dissent by fellow conservative Annette Ziegler, knocked the “ridiculous deadlines” set in the case. She wrote in her dissent it was the first time she could recall the court issuing such an order before the parties had notified the justices of the attorneys they had retained.
The order setting Friday’s deadline came shortly after the majority directed David Strange, the DNC staffer named as the plaintiff in the case, to provide contact information for the Green Party and the Elections Commission.
That order gave Strange just two hours to respond.
In her dissent of that order, again joined by Ziegler, Bradley called the move unprecedented and accused her colleagues of stepping “beyond its neutral role to lawyer the case on behalf of the DNC, seemingly facilitating an expedited review of this original action.”
Typically, the parties named as defendants in a suit declare to the court who will appear on their behalf.
The suit was filed a little more than a week ahead of the Elections Commission meeting on Tuesday to consider ballot access for presidential and vice presidential candidates. That will then be followed by several deadlines for local officials to get ballots printed.
On Wednesday, county clerks are supposed to begin preparing ballots with a Sept. 18 deadline for them to be delivered to local clerks. Municipal clerks then have a Sept. 19 deadline to send absentee ballots to voters who have a request for one on file.
Strange’s petition for original action — which asks the justices to take the case directly without first making it go through the lower courts — argues the Green Party doesn’t have any members eligible to nominate for presidential elections. Without any electors, the complaint argues, the party is ineligible to place someone on the presidential ballot.
Wisconsin Green Party Co-chair Michael White told WisPolitics this afternoon he was still reviewing the lawsuit and knocked Dems for filing it. He sent an email to the court early Thursday afternoon that the party hadn’t yet retained legal counsel.
The Greens over the weekend formally selected Jill Stein to be the party’s presidential nominee this fall. She received 31,072 votes when she was on the Wisconsin ballot in 2016, more than Donald Trump’s 22,748-vote winning margin over Hillary Clinton.
“I would characterize this as a Trump-like effort to eliminate the competition,” White said. “I think it is beneath the standards of the Democratic Party and the principles of Kamala Harris to do such a thing.”
Greens qualified for a line on the presidential ballot after they had a statewide candidate in 2022 eclipse 1% of the vote. As part of the process, party representatives must meet on the first Tuesday in October to nominate a slate of 10 presidential electors.
To be eligible to nominate an elector, party members must be candidates for the Assembly and Senate nominated at the primary, state office holders and holdover state senators. The Wisconsin Greens have no one to qualify after they failed to put up any legislative candidates for this fall.
In response, the party announced plans to recruit candidates for the 2026 elections, vowing that Greens will file to run for guv, LG, secretary of state, the 1st and 3rd congressional districts, and the state Legislature in two years.
