Italo Medelius moved to eastern North Carolina from Peru two decades ago, when he was nine. He says he worked in blueberry fields as a teenager.
Interested in politics, he landed a spot on the state executive committee of the North Carolina Democratic Party two years ago.
But he became disillusioned.
First, by an unsuccessful effort by state Democrats to block the Green Party from the ballot in 2022.
And then earlier this year, when state party chair Anderson Clayton and other Democrats decided against having a competitive presidential primary. That kept Minnesota Rep. Dean Phillips off the ballot against President Joe Biden.
“This past Christmas, I decided to write a letter to (Clayton),” he said. “And it’s still in my drafts. I never sent it because I don’t think that the Democratic Party can be reformed.
Medelius then heard about Cornel West’s long-shot bid for president. He volunteered to lead the fledgling North Carolina chapter of the Justice For All Party, which is trying to get the activist and Union Theological Seminary professor a place on the ballot.
Medelius’ biggest task: helping this spring to get signatures from 13,865 state voters, who support having Justice For All as a party.
Last week, however, the North Carolina Board of Elections voted 3-2 against approving the signatures and placing West on the November ballot.
Medelius and Republicans are furious about the decision, saying the board’s Democratic majority gave unfair scrutiny to the leftwing party. In many ways, it’s a rerun of a 2022 fight over whether the Green Party would be on the ballot for the midterm election.
Two years ago, the Greens said Democratic-aligned groups were harassing the people who signed their petition. Medelius said that’s happening again in 2024, and he said one group has employed “mafioso tactics” against him.
“We started getting contacted by our people who signed the petition saying, ‘Hey we have these people who literally are showing up at our doors,’ ” Medelius said.
He said people were trying to convince them to say they were misled when they signed the petition.
“People are feeling harassed and harangued,” he said.
Medelius said he also received threatening letters.
“I started actual threats to my safety — this time delivered to my mailbox,” he said. “And what made my spine tense up a little bit that there were two that didn’t have stamps on them. It had a bunch of racist statements like,’ Go back to your country’ or ‘You are getting Trump elected.’ ”
After the state elections board voted against recognizing it as a political party, the Green Party sued.
After additional investigation, the board reversed itself and voted to certify the Greens. A federal judge then ordered the state to place the Greens on the ballot, since the filing deadline had passed.
Medelius said Justice For All will also file a lawsuit over ballot access.
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Opposing third parties
One group opposing Justice For All is the state Democratic Party. Another is the national Clear Choice Action PAC. It was formed this year by Pete Kavanagh, who served as a deputy campaign manager for Biden in 2020.
Both want the 2024 election to be a two-person race between Donald Trump and the Democratic nominee, who will most likely be Vice President Kamala Harris.
They don’t want left-wing parties siphoning votes from the Democratic Party.
In response to Medelius’ accusation of “mafioso tactics,” Clear Choice founder Kavanagh said in a statement that Justice For All’s problems stemmed from the group relying on third-party groups to collect almost all of their signatures.
He said the group “openly admitted that they couldn't account for 90% of the petition signatures submitted on their behalf, couldn't say who paid for those signatures to be collected, couldn't say whether those individuals followed state laws or not. Those are the facts."
Clear Choice also challenged Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s We The People Party’s petition. After an earlier rejection, the elections board voted 4-1 last week to place that party on the ballot.
In contesting the Justice For All Party, Clear Choice said county elections boards weren’t doing the required checks to compare petition signatures to the signatures on file when people registered to vote.
Last week, Democratic elections board member Siobhan O’Duffy Millen said Justice For All isn’t a true political party — just a vehicle for West to get on the ballot. She said West should be required to run as an independent, which requires roughly five and a half times as many signatures.
She noted that West is on the ballot in different states under different parties.
“In Colorado, Mr. West is on the ballot as the nominee of the Unity Party,” she said. “In Utah, he’s running as an independent. In South Carolina, he’ll be on the ballot of the United Citizens Party. In Alaska, he’s the nominee of the Aurora Party.
The state board said they attempted to contact 250 people who signed the Justice For All petition.
Of the 49 people investigators were able to interview, 18 people said they didn’t sign and three said they don’t remember signing.
That left 28 people who continued the interview.
Of those, five said they didn’t understand the purpose of the petition.
Most of the others had a general idea of what they were signing, telling investigators that they signed to introduce “additional parties thus reducing polarization” or “to have more people available to vote for” or “get someone on the ballot to run for office as a third party.”
In all, 16 of the 28 were able to offer a clear reason why they signed.
Democratic elections board members pointed out that nearly half of the people interviewed said they didn’t sign or couldn’t remember signing. Republicans countered that there’s no precedent for using a sample of 49 people who happened to be reached invalidating thousands more voter signatures.
At last week’s meeting, elections board chair Alan Hirsch said “I have no confidence that the number of signatures here required by statute have been met.”
He and two other Democrats voted no. Two Republicans voted yes.
Different standards?
Earlier this week, Andy Jackson with the conservative John Locke Foundation told state lawmakers he believed the board treated aspiring political parties differently.
He noted the state board voted to certify the conservative Constitution Party this year with little fanfare.
RFK Jr.’s We the People Party received some scrutiny but was ultimately approved. Kennedy comes from a Democratic family, but polls have shown he’s also getting support from Republicans.
He said the “board acted to keep two progressive parties — Greens and Justice for All — off the ballot.”
Jackson theorized that Republican elections board members might have also voted to reject the Constitution Party if they had a majority to do so.
Republican House Speaker Tim Moore called the rejection a “blatant attempt by Democrats on the NCSBE to bend the rules to insulate their own party’s nominee.”
Medelius says he’s frustrated.
“The only thing I’m doing here is I’m trying to assert my rights,” he said. “As a United States citizen, I have the right to vote for whoever I want to vote for.”
This story has been updated to show that the state elections board in 2022 had voted to certify the Green Party after initially rejecting it. A federal judge ordered the state to place the Green Party on the ballot because the deadline to approve new political parties had passed.
