After the 2020 election the NC Green Party lost its hard won ballot access and had to collect thousands of signatures again, during the pandemic closures, but it expects to regain state recognition later this week. About 22,500 signatures were gathered, around 160% of what is required for state recognition. Several years ago the number of signatures required was reduced. Over the last few days there have been reports that agents of the Democratic Party were able to access the ballot access petitions and are contacting signers, asking them to request that their signatures be invalidated by the State. At this point the NCGP is apparently legally unable to add additional signatures. I haven't seen any news about how the Democrats gained the signer lists, whether any signatures have been disavowed, or whether signatures can even be invalidated this way.
Democratic Party-allied media have been talking about Republican gerrymandering, actions to prevent people from voting, and the attempted "coup" in Washington, but are mostly silent about what the Democrats do, including their own gerrymandering (and also about issues with the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections, the role of the Supreme Court, Republican street tactics, and electronic voting machines without voter-verifiable paper records). In past years I have heard reports about direct attempts by the Democratic Party to block Greens from running for office in other states, but now it is happening here. There are also indirect attacks, such as election laws that make it very hard for third parties and independent candidates to appear on ballots and have votes they receive counted in some states. There have been concerns that votes for Green candidates haven't been properly counted in NC.
In the 2020 election some prominent leftists argued that people should vote for "lesser evil" Biden this time, and they would oppose him next time - except that it would be difficult to organize credible opposition in just four years, and I don't see these people working on a new left opposition party and they would have trouble getting onto the ballot in every state if they did. Alternatively, they aren't organizing street actions large enough to threaten the bipartisan neoliberal imperialist order either. The anti-war movement during the Bush administration and Occupy under Obama failed to seriously worry the government, and these were large movements and very active across the country.
Maybe if the Democrats did more for their voters and Biden followed through on his campaign promises electoral prospects for the Republicans wouldn't be so bright in 2022 and '24. Instead the Federal government seems to be focused on things like Trump's "Big Lie" campaign, reducing inflation at the expense of the working class, fighting left governments in Latin America (one cause of the massive migrant caravans moving north, along with US economic policies and climate change), and going to the brink with Russia and China at the same time, while offending long-standing allies such as the French and Mexican governments and causing global crises. What happened to taking action on climate change and domestic economic inequality? Climate change already seems to be worsening the food crisis caused by the US-Russia conflict over who gets to dominate Ukraine. There might be less of an energy crisis if the Biden administration gave up on trying to overthrow the governments of Iran, Venezuela, and Syria and the "green energy" industry seems to be suffering because of the cold war with China. The BBC portrayed Macron's recent losses to leftists in the French legislative elections as pushing the French government not left but right, and eight years of Obama-Biden and the Democrats in Congress not governing from the left empowered Trump.
Below are two Democratic Party messages released by the NCGP and four messages, allegedly from the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, released by Matthew Hoh's Green US Senate campaign ( twitter.com/MatthewPHoh/status/1540745516169961472 ; this is the first NCGP Senate campaign; campaign site: www.matthewhohforsenate.org ; he sometimes writes for outlets such as Counterpunch):
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