Green Party Looking to Gain Visibility Thru Illinois Primary
Produced by Rob Wildeboer on Wednesday, December 05, 2007

With the Illinois primary exactly two months away, voters have been flooded with news about Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Rudy Giuliani, Mike Huckabee and other well-known democrats and republicans. Less well known are Cynthia McKinney, Jared Ball, Howie Hawkins and Kent Mesplay.

These presidential candidates are seeking the Green Party nomination and their appearance on Illinois' primary ballot is expected to help the local party in a very simple way.

As a fledgling political party, the Green party can't mobilize candidates for every race across Illinois so the local party focussed on getting several presidential candidates on the ballot. Presidential candidates run in every district so that means there's a green candidate running for office in every precinct in Illinois. And that forces every county to print up Green party ballots.

WHITNEY: Election officials should be asking people when they walk in the polls, do you want democrat, republican or green? And that in and of itself I think is a step forward for us.

That's Rich Whitney. He ran as the Green party's candidate for governor last year. He says there are lots of voters who haven't yet heard of the green party and now they will when they're offered that ballot too at the polling place.

WHITNEY: Every time we get that name out there and make people aware that there is this third choice, some of them will get curious and hopefully will google it or whatever they do to get more information and will start looking into it more.

When Whitney ran for governor last year he won more than 5 percent of the vote which, under Illinois law, qualified the Greens as an established political party. That made it a lot easier for candidates to get on the ballot because candidates of established parties need far fewer signatures. As a result there are 32 green party members running for office February 5.