Green Party Candidate Jill Stein Sues Ohio after Officials Rule Votes Won’t Be Counted

Green Party candidate Jill Stein has filed a lawsuit against the state of Ohio after election officials ruled that her votes won’t be counted in the November presidential race.

State election officials said they won’t count Stein’s votes on Election Day because her party apparently named her running mate after the deadline.

Stein, running mate Butch Ware, and three Ohio voters filed the suit on Wednesday.

They are claiming that the decision “infringes on their constitutional rights to free speech, association, and equal protection and the voting rights of the Ohio-based plaintiffs,” according to the Washington Examiner.

Stein filed as an independent candidate in Ohio because the Green Party lost its state recognition several years ago.

She named party nominee for Ohio governor Anita Rios as a placeholder for her running mate until Ware was nominated in August to fill the position.

Ohio election officials said Stein’s name would still be on the state ballots, which were already shipped to overseas military voters.

However, votes for her and Rios/Ware would not be counted.

The request to remove Rios was granted, but the request to add Ware was received after the deadline, the officials said.

The lawsuit contends that the request by Rios to withdraw her candidacy was submitted by a local party official without Rios’s knowledge.

The lawsuit plaintiffs want a temporary injunction.

They are also calling for a restraining order to force officials to count votes for Stein.

In 2020, Stein received 46,271 votes in Ohio, less than 1% of the votes in the state.

Her vote total was only about 10% of the more than 450,000 votes that separated President Donald Trump and Joe Biden in Ohio, which had 18 electoral votes.

Trump handily won the state despite having only a narrow advantage in polling close to Election Day.

In 2024, Ohio looks like a solid win for Trump again.

Trump’s position is only made stronger by the fact that Ohio is the home state of his running mate Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH).

Stein is one of the last third-party candidates left standing after Robert F. Kennedy Jr. withdrew from the race.

Kennedy ended his own campaign and endorsed Trump in August.

While the counting of her votes might not make much of a difference in Ohio, there are swing states that had smaller vote margins in 2020.

If just 45,000 votes more votes in Georgia, Arizona, and Wisconsin had gone to Trump, it could have been an entirely different result.

READ MORE – Green Party Seeks Supreme Court Intervention over Jill Stein’s Exclusion from Nevada Ballot

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