Gaming the System
By When actually existing Greens in New York didn’t want to follow the lead of their 2000 presidential candidate and act as a cat’s paw of the Republican Party, Republicans tried to do it for them:
What kind of shenanigans are going on now?” That’s what Darin Robbins, a Green Party member in Corning, New York, thought when he learned that a stranger had circulated a petition to place his name on the ballot for a House race.
Robbins had no plans to seek office, so he was shocked a couple of weeks ago when a Green Party secretary called to tell him that a petition had been filed in his name to run against GOP Rep. Tom Reed, the vulnerable first-term Republican who represents the 23rd congressional district in upstate New York.
The story gets stranger. A Republican operative was behind the attempt to put Robbins on the ballot. Aaron Andrew Keister, a notary public who has worked as a video tracker for the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC), the political committee dedicated to electing GOPers to the House, filed ballot access petitions—each bearing the signatures of about 75 registered voters—for Robbins and a second Green Party member. If Keister’s plan had succeeded, it could have helped Reed—the Northeast regional chairman of the NRCC—by putting on the ballot a progressive candidate who would likely draw votes away from his expected Democratic opponent, county legislator Martha Robertson. But Keister messed up: Because he filed the Robbins petition late and got the other Green Party member’s address wrong, neither Green will appear on the ballot for the June primary or the November general election, according to New York election officials.
Had Keister been more competent, it would have worked, too.