The Maryland Green Party met the 10,000 signature requirement to get recognized as a political party in Maryland, which lets it put candidates on the November ballot. File photo by Angela Breck.
Even though the Maryland Green Party first won official recognition in the state in 2000, party chair Brian Bittner was happy to call it the “new” party in the state this week.
That’s because state election officials certified that the party had collected more than the 10,000 petition signatures needed to be officially recognized by the state as a political party , a designation that allows it to place candidates on the ballot without having to go through a petition process for those.
It was close: The party submitted more than 17,000 signatures, but state officials verified just 10,134 of those. But Bittner is not looking back.
“That’s enough for this year,” Bittner said. “So we are a ‘new party.’”
With its newfound status, the Maryland Green Party was able to put presidential nominee Jill Stein and her running mate, Butch Ware, on the ballot in Maryland. They join Republican nominees Donald Trump and J.D. Vance, Democrats Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, and the Libertarian slate of Chase Oliver and Mike ter Maat in the race for president.
Voters in Maryland will also have a chance to vote for the unaffiliated ticket of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Nicole Shanahan, who collected enough signatures to make the ballot but who suspended their campaign in 10 battleground states on Friday. Another 10 candidates will not appear on the ballot but have filed the paperwork with the Maryland State Board of Elections to be considered as write-in presidential candidates.
Kennedy pulled out of battleground states, but will appear on Maryland ballot in November
It’s the latest in the Green Party’s on-again, off-again history as a recognized political party in the state. A party’s recognition lasts for two years, unless its candidate wins at least 1% of the vote in the next general election or has 1% of the state’s voters registered as members. Barring that, it has to collect petition signatures again.
Maryland’s Greens were first recognized in 2000 and have petitioned themselves back into official recognition five times since then. The latest recognition lapsed in 2022, when Bittner said COVID-19 made it challenging to collect signatures.
Maryland is one of several states that allow political parties other than the Republican and Democratic parties to petition to be on the ballot, though the requirements differ, according to a 2020 summary from the National Association of Secretaries of State. Louisiana only requires that 1,000 voters register with a party for it to be recognized, while Massachusetts and Missouri require 10,000 petition signatures, like Maryland. In states like Wyoming and Idaho, a candidate or party needs to enough signatures to equal 2% of voters from the previous election to win recognition.
Bittner believes that in a Democrat-heavy state like Maryland, third-party efforts are often an uphill battle and even getting on the ballot is a challenge.
“It’s an antiquated system. A new party has to collect 10,000 signatures from registered voters in Maryland. Every signature has to be on a sheet of paper. It has to be signed with a pen,” he said. He noted that something as simple as people signing their names differently than what’s on their voter registration forms, or accidentally putting in the wrong date, can cause a petition signature to be rejected.
Bittner said that getting signatures took up a majority of the party’s time this year, time that could have been used for recruiting candidates for office.
“We think, maybe at some level, the folks who keep these laws on the books know that it takes all of our time,” he said. “And knows that we’re not able to recruit and build up candidates when we’re busy just trying to get on the ballot. So that kind of limited our recruitment for 2024.”
As it is, the party – which is considered a progressive alternative to the Democrats, focusing on environmentalism and the effects of climate change – has been able to recruit a handful of candidates for 2024 in addition to Stein. Maryland Greens are putting forth Claudia Barber for circuit court judge in Anne Arundel County, Nancy Wallace for the House seat currently held by Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-8th), and Renaud Brown for Baltimore City Council District 14, now held by Councilmember Odette Ramos.
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Bittner understands that growing the Maryland Green Party is a “long-term” vision, and he doesn’t suspect that the presence of Green Party candidates will greatly sway the election this fall.
“I don’t see the Green Party having a substantial impact on the election in terms of who’s going to win for president, anyway,” he said. “I think it’s more important that we’re committed to building this movement. Changing the ways that laws are written, the was that elections are run and votes are counted.”
A recent poll from the AARP surveying 600 likely voters showed that Stein garnered 1% of support from those choosing a presidential candidate, far behind Harris, who had 64% of voters in the poll, and Trump, who had 32%.
But without the burden of collecting petition signatures for the next election, Bittner thinks the party will have more time to recruit candidates for the 2026 election.
“In 2026 we’re looking to run a strong candidate for governor and we’re looking to run local candidates statewide … so that’s what we’re trying to recruit for right now,” Bittner said.
“In the long term, we have a vision of multiparty democracy. Where it’s not two parties battling for 99% of the votes and four or three parties fighting for 1%, but we want a system where there’s five to six parties who roughly share equally. And that forces legislators to get together and do actual work,” he said.
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