A Co-Chair of the Illinois Green Party and the Green Party's candidate for State Representative in the 88th District, Phil Huckelberry, today wrote in an email to supporters, "The Illinois State Board of Elections, operating in its capacity as the Illinois State Officers Electoral Board, has just ruled unanimously, 8-0, to place the Green Party state slate on the November, 2006 general election ballot. September 1 is the certification deadline, so our candidates will be duly certified tomorrow."

On June 26th, the Green Party filed a nominating petition containing more than 39,000 signatures, collected within a 90 day period. New parties are required to collect 25,000 signatures within this period to get onto the ballot in Illinois, while established parties need only 5,000 according to state law. The petition measured approximately 19 inches thick.

According to the State Board of Elections' website, within 2 hours, a copy of the petition was requested by Mike Kasper, General Counsel and Treasurer of the Democratic Party of Illinois, at 6:00pm. One week later, on July 3rd, an objection to the petition was filed, claiming that many of the signatures were not genuine or did not belong to registered voters.

Green Party officials stated that the objections seem to have been made at random without actual examination of any records. The objectors' petition contained objections to signatures that Greens had already crossed out and in some cases objections were made to the 11th signature of a page, even though each page contained only 10.

Today's vote represents the culmination of a weeks-long hearing, resulting from the objection. The hearing process involved as many as 12 or more election judges consistently working full-time for several weeks. Each party also provided a matching number of members to sit with the election judges, during the workday, as they examined thousands of signatures, either overruling or sustaining each objection. Objections were assumed valid, and automatically sustained, unless a Green Party representative was present before each election judge to compare signatures and present a defense.

Following the hearing, the Board's Hearing Officer, Barbara Goodman, reccomended that the Green Party's candidates be placed on the ballot and stated that the case was "extremely straightforward." The Board's examination confirmed that the Greens collected thousands more than the required number of signatures for ballot access.

Greens have accused the Democrats of wasting taxpayer money in a frivilous attempt to bog them down in legal proceedings. Green candidates also claim that they were forced to spend a significant amount of campaign funds on legal representation.

In related news, former presidential candidate Ralph Nader and his running mate must pay more than $80,000 in expenses for the lawsuit that challenged their nominating papers and kept them off the 2004 ballot, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled in a recent decision.

There was an implication of "fraud and deception" in their petition drive, the court said in its ruling.