Green Party Locked Out of November Ballot

I believe that the right to vote is one of our most important. ACLU President and New York Law Professor Nadine Strossen has said:

"Our constitutional democracy rests on certain core principles. Every vote should be counted accurately, every vote should be counted equally, and no one should be denied the right to vote based on the color of his or her skin."

In San Francisco's March election, it appears that votes were counted accurately, but then the Department of Elections changed its ruling, effectively moving to keep a third party candidate off of the ballot in November.

Terry Baum, a Green Party candidate for Congress in District 8, ran a write-in campaign to get on the ballot to represent the party against Democratic incumbent Nancy Pelosi in November. State law barred her from being on the ballot EXCEPT as a write-in, because she had been registered as a Democrat in the past 23 months.

She needed 1605 write-in votes from registered Greens to qualify, and on Monday, March 15, after two weeks of counting, John Arntz, head of the Department of Elections, told her that she had succeeded.

Their initial count of write-ins had stood at 1407 on March 10. The DOE then went back to check for votes where Greens had written in Terry Baum's name, but failed to connect the arrow on the ballot. (There were also voters who wrote in her name under the wrong office, but these were not counted.)

On Monday, March 15 at 8 am, Terry received a call from Mr. Arntz with the news that she had received 1651 votes -- putting her over the top by 46 votes. The DOE had worked over the weekend counting all the Green ballots, and 244 had written in her name without connecting the arrow.

That was a week ago. A story came out in today's SF Examiner putting Terry's historic efforts into perspective, "Baum makes write-in history."

Terry reported getting a call from Mr Arntz today, after the story broke, that "the City Attorney says they CANNOT count the votes where people wrote in my name but forgot to connect the arrow. This reverses what the City Attorney said before."

I can see why the City Attorney, as a registered Democrat, might have an interest in keeping a third party candidate off of the ballot, although I am inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt.

It seems to me that the voting rights of registered Greens are at stake here, although this might seem like a trivial case to members of the two major parties.