The Green Party has qualified for the general election ballot in Nevada for the first time since 2008, though a lawsuit brought by Nevada Democrats to block the party’s access remains pending in Carson City District Court.

Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar told county election officials last week that the Green Party had submitted about 15,000 valid signatures, well more than the roughly 10,000 threshold needed for minor political parties to qualify for a general election ballot. 

The Green Party’s inclusion on the general election ballot adds another variable to the presidential race, because it could pull away dissatisfied left-leaning voters from supporting President Joe Biden. The party has not been on a Nevada general election ballot since 2008, when its presidential candidate Cynthia McKinney received around 1,400 votes, and in 2016, a federal judge denied ballot access to the party after it had not gathered enough valid signatures in time but asked to count signatures submitted after a deadline.

In Nevada’s 2022 U.S. Senate race, Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV) won by fewer than 8,000 votes, while Biden won by around 34,000 in 2020.

The Green Party had submitted nearly 30,000 signatures to gain ballot access, meaning around half of them were considered invalid. The Nevada Democratic Party’s lawsuit alleged that most of the signatures submitted were invalid (the party had conducted a limited review of signatures through a public records request) and asked a Carson City court to invalidate the signatures gathered and prohibit the secretary of state’s office from approving the Green Party’s petition. A hearing on the lawsuit is scheduled for later this month.

Democrats argued that some petition signatures were gathered before the petition had been approved and should not be considered valid. In addition, some of the sworn affidavits on petition forms had been altered to change the county of the petition circulator, exhibit documents claim.

The Green Party’s candidate for the presidential race this year is Jill Stein, who was also the party’s presidential nominee in 2012 and 2016. 

The presidential field is not complete yet in Nevada, as independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. must gather at least 10,095 signatures by July 5 before election officials undertake a signature verification process. This is Kennedy’s third petition to gain ballot access after its first was invalidated for not including a running mate (which is being challenged in court), and its second was pulled after it misspelled “United States,” which was likely unnecessary because there are no Nevada statutes that indicate such a typo would invalidate a ballot petition.