Dr. Jill Stein just finished a whirlwind tour of North Carolina November 14–17, stopping for events in Charlotte, Asheville, Greensboro, Raleigh, and Durham.

During Stein's visit, she and Bruce Dixon (of Black Agenda Report and the Georgia Green Party), as well as North Carolina Green Party co-chair Wayne Turner, Michael Dennis of the Triangle Greens, and I talked to many people about ballot access in our state and laid out a new plan for mobilizing supporters and achieving it. Stein’s tour got ample media coverage, relatively speaking, appearing in at least 9 media outlets we know of. And we signed up many people to help with our ballot access effort.

Our goal: obtain 200 volunteers committed to collecting 500 signatures in the next 6 months.

These numbers might seem high, but they are completely doable—as long as we all understand that it’s possible to collect 100+ signatures in one day’s work. Example: In the Triangle, NC Green Party member Jan Martell collected 188 the other day. I collected 110. And Wayne Turner collected 37 in a matter of an hour and a half. We simply need your commitment and camaraderie in this effort. We’ve already had 33 people sign up to help in just a few days.

We will kick off this initiative with a BALLOT ACCESS PLEDGE.  Michael Dennis of Durham has built this new North Carolina Green Party website on the NationBuilder platform to launch the initiative. It is a powerful tool to help us get this work done—to keep us connected to each other and to emphasize the shared nature of this work.

Please go to the website http://ncgreenparty.nationbuilder.com/ballot_pledge to read and sign the pledge. Forward this link to other people in your networks that might be interested.

When you take the pledge, you won’t be alone: We’ll follow up with you, answer your questions, and provide you with resources both for gathering signatures and enlisting new petition carriers. (We don’t merely want people to sign. We want to turn signers into people who collect signatures.) And we’ll notify you of venues and events in your area that are prime venues for gathering signatures.

We are also working to get other organizations on board as allies in our petition drive. Already the International Socialist Organization chapter in Asheville has committed to gathering signatures for us. They are very impressed with Jill Stein and helped bring out about 80 people for her talk at UNCA last Sunday, November 15. If that non-Green group has committed to helping us, I would hope that our own Green membership will also commit. We will continue to keep you informed as more organizations and individuals come on board.

Let’s start meeting locally and start talking seriously about getting a ballot line for 2016. Unless each one of us commits now, there will be no alternative to Hillary Clinton and the GOP in 2016.

Michael Trudeau

Triangle Green Party
[email protected]