A Montana judge is ordering the Green Party be removed from the state’s November ballot because it did not have enough valid signatures to qualify.
Prompted by a lawsuit by the Montana Democratic Party, Judge James Reynolds from Helena District Court invalidated 87 of the 7,386 signatures collected because they didn’t match those on file or because of improper signature-gathering practices, 8KPAX News reported.
This was enough to remove Green Party candidates up and down the ballot, including two who hoped to appear on the line against Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont., in his re-election bid.
Nancy Keenan, the Montana Democratic Party’s executive director, praised the ruling as a win for democracy, 8KPAX News added.
“Today’s ruling is a win for Montanans against the tactics of out-of-state, Republican dark money groups that are blatantly trying to interfere in Montana’s democracy”, Keenan said in a statement reported by Associated Press. Democrats had alleged in their lawsuit that conservative interest groups had funded the Green Party’s signature collection efforts in an attempt to split votes.
Meanwhile, Montana Green Party coordinator Danielle Breck said she was upset Green Party voters wouldn’t be represented.
“It’s frustrating,” Breck told AP News. “Voter rights is one of the (Democratic Party’s) platforms, then they go about blatant suppression.”
This isn’t the first time the two major parties in Montana have used third parties to hurt each other’s chances of winning. In 2012, a super PAC funded by labor and environmental groups spent $500,000 on ads calling Dan Cox, a Libertarian candidate, “the real conservative.” Cox won nearly 32,000 votes that year, helping Tester beat then-Rep. Denny Rehberg, a Republican, by a margin of just 18,000 votes.
This year Tester is being challenged by Republican state Auditor Matt Rosendale and a new Libertarian candidate, Rick Breckenridge, L-Mont., who earned 3.2 percent of the vote in the 2016 House race against then-Rep. Ryan Zinke, R-Mont.
President Trump threw his support behind Rosendale during a campaign rally earlier this month.
