Socialist/Green Matt Erard is First GPMI Candidate to Qualify for November State Election Ballot
Thursday, 24 July 2008

Dually-Nominated Candidate Qualified for a Second Time to Challenge Rebekah Warren on the November Ballot for Michigan's 53rd District (Ann Arbor) State House Seat.

ANN ARBOR -- Having already won the nomination of the Socialist Party USA by unanimous vote of its local affiliate, the "Washtenaw County Reds," Matt Erard, a University of Michigan alumnus and graduate student at the University of Michigan's School of Social Work, unanimously won the joint nomination of the Green Party of Michigan for the same seat at its Washtenaw County Nominating Caucus on Monday July 14th. After filing the necessary paperwork work with the Washtenaw County Clerk's office following the Nominating Caucus last week, Erard's name was added to the General Election Candidate Listing on Michigan Secretary of State's website yesterday as the first Green Party candidate to qualify for the November General Election ballot.

Erard, who currently serves as the State Chairperson of the Socialist Party of Michigan, the National Ballot Access Coordinator for the Socialist Party's 2008 presidential ticket of Brian Moore and Stewart Alexander, and the founding organizer of the Michigan Third Parties Coalition, is no stranger to restrictive ballot access laws. Although the nationally-affiliated Socialist Party of Michigan has over a century long history of running candidates across the state, including the past five state elections, it has done so without recognition by the state of Michigan as a ballot qualified party. Michigan's extraordinarily prohibitive ballot access laws effectively deny minor parties a spot on the ballot in any race in the state if they do not have budgets of many tens of thousands of dollars to spend on a statewide qualifying effort.

Consequently, when Erard was first nominated by the Socialist Party as its candidate for 53rd District State Representative in 2006, he became the first candidate in over thirty years to receive the requisite number of signatures to be nominated for the General Election ballot directly by 53rd District voters. Despite being listed on the ballot as a candidate with "No Party Affiliation," due to Michigan being among a minority of states that prohibits even independently qualified candidates from listing a party label on the ballot, Erard's extensive campaigning during the 2006 election still led him to receive the votes of eight-hundred and forty-seven Ann Arbor voters.

Now a dual member of the Socialist Party and the Green Party, which has remained ballot-qualified in Michigan since 2000, Erard sought the Green Party nomination this year, in addition to the nomination of the Socialist Party, in order to build an even more formidable grassroots coalition for 2008 - organized around the complimentary aims and struggles for social equality, civil liberties, peace, ecology, and democracy, which the platforms of both grassroots parties to which he belongs represent.

"Serving as a candidate of both the Green Party and the Socialist Party doesn't at all entail having to worry about any conflicting positions between the two that would inhibit me from representing both parties to the fullest. Although the Socialist Party of Michigan supports all of the programmatic demands in the Green Party of Michigan's platform, it also takes these demands a step further toward a systemic analysis of the root of existing struggles" Erard said. "While the Green Party, as an even wider electoral coalition, includes both socialists and non-socialists in its membership, the socialist appeal of my campaign, which reflects the specific Socialist Party side of my dual nomination, serves only as a supplement to the overlapping political programs of the two parties I'm representing this year."

Erard noted that the Green and Socialist parties in Michigan have long had an amiable, rather than competitive relationship. He suggested that the positive association between the two state parties, which have run jointly nominated candidates in each Michigan election since 2002, is partially out of similarity in political principle and partially a reflection of the state Green Party''s commitment to pluralistic democracy in the face of highly undemocratic ballot access restrictions. Erard hopes to use his 2008 campaign to help build both parties in Michigan as electoral forces that can speak to the real and immediate concerns of working people and youth against escalating corporate assaults on our rights, living standards, and environment from which the major parties have consistently provided complicity rather than relief.

With an extensive campaign platform that he feels incorporates all of the central positions of both parties as they pertain to this election, Erard is consistently identifying his candidacy this year with both party labels and listing the summaries of principles, key values, and membership information for both parties on his campaign's website and brochure. Erard looks forward to the dual nomination of two other candidates already nominated by the Socialist Party who are also seeking the nomination of the Green Party at its State Convention in Marshall this weekend and who plan a similar dual campaign format: Dwain Reynolds for State Board of Education and Jean Treacy for 1st District Representative in Congress. He also looks forward to working side by side with other Michigan Green candidates this year, who he says may not all also be dual Socialists, but who nonetheless share underlying Green values, most of the same immediate demands, and will commendably serve as the anti-corporate voices for social justice and people's power in their respective races.

Ultimately Erard hopes that the Socialist Party and the Green Party can work together to help build the mass movement for the widest possible break from the Democratic Party, which he argues Michigan workers in particular are coming to realize is inseparable from the corporate interests that finance it. "The Democratic Party cannot be transformed into anything other than a corporate apparatus for quelling social movements and disenfranchising the working majority," Erard said. "But it can only continue to succeed with that function as long as we the people continue to take the bait of its politicians' posturing and invest our political struggles and hopes within its clutches."

Erard contends that that the first term of Rebekah Warren, the Democratic incumbent candidate for 53rd District State Representative whom he first challenged in 2006, has epitomized such corporate capitulation at the state level. "During the course of a financial meltdown cutting across the state's public and private sectors since Warren first took office, she has failed to take a stand for any of the types of restructuring proposals that are urgently needed to bring paltry relief, much less solutions, to the emergency conditions facing working people of this state" Erard said. "While the nearly limitless number of major corporations that have bankrolled her campaign have been able to count on her votes to ensure that there's no shortage of taxpayer dollars available for private industry handouts, the "progressive principles" she touted during the 2006 race predictably appear to have been left in an old dusty bin reserved for contested Democratic primaries."

Even more so, than in 2006, Erard looks forward to the coming campaign with optimistic enthusiasm. "With the support of both the Socialist and Green Parties this year, a growing grassroots support base among 53rd District voters, and so many Ann Arbor voters who are increasingly exasperated with their representation by the Democratic Party in both Lansing and Washington, we're confident in swinging the pendulum further towards working people's power in 2008. Unlike Warren and the rest of our Democratic opponents, our arena, in building an independent movement of the working and oppressed majority, is not limited to the Capitol Building, but rather extends to mass action in our workplaces and on the streets" Erard said.

The listing of the Erard Campaign's Qualification for the November General Election Ballot can be found here.

Erard's 2008 campaign website can be found at www.erard2008.org.