If District voters were paying close attention to their ballots in the 1996 presidential election, they noticed consumer advocate Ralph Nader running for president under the Green Party banner. Enough people voted for Nader and the Green Party that he placed third in the District, ahead of Texas billionaire H. Ross Perot. However, Nader’s campaign fell more than 2,700 votes short of achieving ballot status.

The D.C. Green Party needs at least 7,500 votes cast for one of its candidates in a Nov. 3 general election in order to achieve ballot status in the District, said Bill O’Field, spokesman for the D.C. Board of Elections and Ethics. O’Field said "ballot status" means the political party gains the right to hold primary elections and voters can register under the Green Party label. More significantly, the required number of signatures to get candidates on the ballot would drop drastically. O’Field said the requirement is 2,000 signatures or 1 percent of voters registered as members of a political party, whichever is less. As an example, he said D.C. State-hood Party members need only 40 signatures to run for office because they have only 4,013 registered members.

"We are at the very beginning right now," said Scott McLarty, the Green Party’s Ward 1 council candidate. "Ralph Nader helped get us off the ground."

McLarty and U.S. "shadow" representative candidate Mike Livingston both said their work during Nader’s presidential bid was the start of their heavy involvement in the Green Party.

McLarty said Nader’s campaign was, in some ways, a symbolic effort to gain name recognition for the party. The Green Party is active in nearly half the states and, according to party literature, 53 Green Party members currently hold elective office in the United States.

"We’re not running any more symbolic campaigns," McLarty said.

McLarty, 40, is single and has lived in the District since 1993, currently south of Adams Morgan in Northwest Washington. A self-described activist, his memberships include the Emergency Coalition to Save Rent Control, the Labor Party, the Alliance for Democracy and the Washing-ton Peace Center.

McLarty has never sought or been elected to public office. He said he felt compelled to run this year out of concern for the District’s neighborhoods.

"We are worried that this city is being bought up by large outside money," McLarty said. Calling it "domino development," he cited such big development projects as the MCI Center, the new convention center and proposed projects like a baseball park on Massachusetts Avenue, an entertainment complex in Chinatown and a rumored mall in Columbia Heights as threats to the quality of residential life in the District.

McLarty also proposes supporting small, local businesses instead of outside-owned corporations and chain stores, universal health care and expansion of the University of the District of Columbia. He also supports statehood, full congressional representation for D.C. residents and the resumption of the federal payment to the District that could lower local taxes for middle- and low-income residents.

Livingston, 27, was born in the District but grew up in suburban Wheaton, Md. He has been a resident of the Brightwood neighborhood in Northwest Washington for the past three years.

"I’m tired of living in a colony and being treated like a second-class citizen because of where I live," Livingston said.

He said he views the office of U.S. "shadow" representative, an unpaid position, as more than a lobbyist for statehood.

"I do dispute the assumption that statehood is the sole purpose of the shadow delegation," Livingston said. "The shadow delegation needs to act as a (full) congressional delegation would. Statehood itself will do little if it’s not backed up by a livable city."

Livingston advocates a commuter tax, new drug treatment centers in the District and the expansion and improvement of the area’s public transportation systems.

As might be guessed by the name of the movement, "the Greens" — as they are popularly known — are environmentally active and have campaigned worldwide on environmental issues. Livingston and McLarty stress, however, that the Greens are about much more than environmental issues. Their campaign literature cites issues such as universal health care, affordable housing, quality education and the support of Initiative 59, which would make medicinal marijuana available to seriously and terminally ill patients suffering from diseases like cancer and AIDS.

The Greens and the D.C. Statehood parties are closely allied in this fall’s election and each party openly supports the other’s candidates, with the exception of the U.S. representative race, in which the parties are running candidates against each other. Philosophically, both parties support many of the same positions. Both Green candidates said there has been talk of uniting the parties, but neither of them sees that possibility in the future.

"That’s kind of a pipe dream for us," McLarty said. He said while it would be mutually beneficial to both parties, the logistics of uniting two political parties might be too difficult to overcome.

"I don’t think anyone would be opposed to that," Livingston said, "but I also don’t think there’s any need for it. We have better ways to spend our time than worrying about the formality of our alliance."

Copyright 1998, The Common Denominator