Matthew Hoh is running for Senate as a Green Party candidate in North Carolina. He joined us on our podcast to discuss the Democrats' fraudulent campaign to remove him from the ballot, as well as the challenges and opportunities of third party candidacies.
A partial transcript of the interview is listed below. To listen to our full conversation, click the player embedded in this post and subscribe to our substack to receive all of our podcasts, videos, and articles.
Keaton Weiss: Why don't you just introduce yourself - who you are, what compelled you to run, and what compelled you to run as a Green?
Matthew Hoh: Sure. I was in the Marine Corps for 10 years, I went to war three times with the State Department as well. In 2009 I resigned in protest over the escalation of the war, and that brought me into the anti-war community, brought me into the media, brought me into the think tank world, and through the last 12 years I've been involved in differing degrees of activism, whether in Congress talking to members of Congress, or on the street getting arrested trying to stand up for other folks out there.
About a year ago, the Green Party reached out to me and said, “Would you like to run?” I had never even been affiliated with a political party before the Green Party and certainly never been a candidate. [I] thought about it for a little bit, saw the issues, saw things that were occurring, you know just the the continual drum beat of suffering that goes on around us, and including the people i love. People who can't go to the doctor unless they check their banking account, right? People in my neighborhood who are losing homes because corporations are coming in, purchasing the homes, and then jacking up their rent, and these folks have to move.
The number of people i know who've died of overdose, if you're a combat veteran, I know six people. In North Carolina here, we have 12 people die a day from opioid overdose. If that's not an indication that the war on drugs is a complete and abject failure, and is ruinous to our communities, along with the mass incarceration piece of it, then i i don't know what would be that indication.
And so if someone is not on the ballot representing those issues and the people who are the constituency of those issues, [then those issues'] are not being represented at all. And so that's what we're trying to do down here in North Carolina is represent the working class, represent the middle class, because they are otherwise not represented by the two parties that are beholden to corporate and bank interests.
KW: So you're running as a green in North Carolina, you submitted about 22,000 signatures, which is about 9,000 more than you need, almost 16 000 of those were certified, and then what happened?
So as we said, we turned in more than 22,500. We ended up having almost 2100 more verified signatures than we needed. The signatures [were] verified by the county, and it's not uncommon for signatures not to be verified. In fact, the rule of thumb basically is that [for] every four signatures you turn in, only three are going to count. And that's just not for here in North Carolina, that's across the country. Oftentimes your verification rate is less than that - 70 or 65 percent - just the way petitioning works. There's nothing nefarious about that.
So we turned in our signatures on June 1st. It's important to note that we had a July 1st deadline to be certified by, and not only did the state have to certify us by that deadline, we also then had to hold a nominating convention, we had to have our folks go out and register as Green Party members, and we had to have our candidates file. So there's a whole host of things that had to occur after we were certified.
To demonstrate how this was entirely done in bad faith by the state, the state chose not to hold its certification meeting until June 30th, which would have given us less than a day to get all those other things done in order to be on the ballot. So right away, there's just bad faith right in front of us.
But what happens is we turn in our signatures to the North Carolina State Board of Elections - the 15,953 verified ones - and the state says “Well there are these 200 signatures that we're concerned about.”
And these were 200 signatures that weren't even part of that 15,953. These were signatures that had not been verified by the counties, that the counties had kind of pointed out, “Hey, this is odd.” The state looked at these signatures for 30 days. They found no evidence of fraud, nothing that would indicate that we were out there doing something wrong. But their argument was that since there were these irregularities, that means there could be more. And because there could be more, we need more time to investigate. But because tomorrow's the deadline, we don't have that time, so we're not going to certify you.
There's all kinds of layers to this. I think one of the things that strikes people about this is that this sounds an awful lot like the argument the Republicans were using - that Giuliani and his band of crooks were using to try and overturn the election in court in 2020. This idea that there could be fraud, there are these theories of fraud, but we don't have the evidence - but there could be so we can't let this go forward.
That's basically what we ran into. And it's complete nonsense. It's just an excuse not to certify us, keep us off the ballot, and so we're fighting this of course. And we expect to be on the ballot in November, which is a spot that we earned.
To hear our full conversation, click the player embedded in this post. Be sure to subscribe to our substack to receive all of our podcasts, videos, and articles.
Support Matthew Hoh’s campaign at matthewhohforsenate.org
Democrats Subvert Democracy to Kick Greens Off North Carolina Ballot