The Supreme Court refused Friday to intervene in the Green Party’s efforts to put presidential candidate Jill Stein on the ballot in the battleground state of Nevada for the November election.
The Nevada Green Party had asked the justices to halt a ruling from the state’s high court that keeps Stein off the ballot. The state court said the party failed to meet the requirements for ballot access and that signatures it collected had to be invalidated.
The justices denied the request to intervene in a one-sentence order that did not explain their reasoning. There were no noted dissents.
Stein’s appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court was filed by attorney Jay Sekulow. He also has represented former president Donald Trump, the Republican nominee who is locked in a tight race with Vice President Kamala Harris.
Green Party candidates are “wrongfully ripped from the ballot and Nevadans who would vote for them in this election are robbed of the opportunity to do so,” Sekulow told the Supreme Court in the party’s emergency request.
Nevada’s Democratic Party initiated the lawsuit to exclude the Green Party from the ballot in June, claiming the party had used the wrong form to collect the necessary signatures from registered voters.
“At issue is not a mere technical violation for the use of the wrong form,” lawyers representing the Democrats told the Supreme Court. The signature-gathering requirements, the filing said, are designed to prevent fraud and protect “the fairness and integrity of the political process.”
Nevada’s Attorney General Aaron D. Ford (D) told the justices that it was too late to intervene in the state court’s decision because of the compressed timeline to print and mail ballots before the Nov. 5 election. Federal law requires military-overseas ballots to be sent at least 45 days before the election. In addition, the state sends mail ballots to Nevada voters between Sept. 26 and Oct. 23.
Requiring the state to reprint and send new ballots would “create an insurmountable problem: It would undermine the integrity of Nevada’s election,” Ford said in a court filing.
Presidential elections have been decided in recent years by slim margins, leading to concerns among some Democrats and Republicans that a third-party candidate could affect the outcome in battleground states this year. Groups affiliated with both parties have challenged some third-party bids to get on the ballot.
But third-party efforts have struggled this campaign season. Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. suspended his campaign in late August. Cornel West, another independent candidate, has faced financial and legal troubles getting on ballots.
The Green Party is on the ballot in 27 states, including five battlegrounds. Stein has run twice before. In 2016, she drew 1.4 million votes nationally as the Green Party nominee — a small fraction of those received by Trump or Democrat Hillary Clinton. But Democrats viewed Stein as a spoiler in a number of battleground states where the race was close.
Although Nevada has not voted for a Republican presidential nominee since 2004, support among Latino and young voters for President Joe Biden had been receding in the state before his exit from the race, according to a Fox News poll from June. That poll and others found Trump with small leads over Biden. Political operatives from both parties believe the contest between Trump and Harris in Nevada will be close.
Earlier this month, a divided Supreme Court of Nevada sided with Democrats and ordered the secretary of state to keep Green Party candidates off the general election ballot. The court called the party’s use of the wrong form, which did not include an affidavit verifying the registration status of those signing the petition, an “unfortunate mistake.”
The Green Party’s lawyer said it was wrongly advised by the Secretary of State’s Office to use the form for ballot initiatives and referendums — not for minor party ballot access. The party collected and submitted 29,584 signatures.
In the filing, the party called the state court’s action “extraordinary, denying … both due process and equal protection under the federal Constitution.”
In response, the Democratic Party’s lawyers, led by Philip A. Irwin of Covington & Burling, said the Nevada law is clear and that the mistake on the part of the Secretary of State’s Office was inadvertent.
“A civil servant’s mistake,” the filing says, “does not give rise to a due process right to be excused from the strictures of a clear law.”