North Carolina Democrats have asked a state court to overturn an elections board vote granting the Green Party official recognition despite allegations of fraud.
Democrats have been accused by the Green Party of meddling in its petitioning process to qualify candidates for the November ballot.
The lawsuit, filed Wednesday in Wake County Superior Court, precedes the first hearing next Monday in a Green Party lawsuit against the North Carolina State Board of Elections, when the newly certified party will fight for an extension to a statutory deadline preventing its candidates from appearing on the ballot.
The party lost its official status after it failed to get at least 2% of the vote for either president or governor in 2020. The party needed to collect 13,865 valid signatures from registered voters in the state to regain recognition by petition.
The party exceeded that number, even after fraudulent signatures were removed from the petitions. Those signatures that were discredited have been linked to two contractors: Evans Political Consulting, of Arkansas, and First Choice Contracting, of Michigan. But the contractors only collected a small portion of the overall number of signatures submitted by the Green Party.
WUNC's Rusty Jacobs contributed to this report