Her campaign’s inability to meet state requirements for public financing represents a significant failure for the gubernatorial candidacy of Green Party candidate Jill Stein. To qualify, the Greens needed to collect more than 6000 $5-to-$100 donations and file the accompanying paperwork with the state by June 4. (Democratic gubernatorial candidate Warren Tolman, for example, did so and has already received $3 million for his campaign.)

Speaking to the Phoenix last week, Stein attributed this failure to " technicalities which we thought were unjust " and claimed that local town halls arbitrarily rejected the paperwork or, in some cases, wrongly applied the same strict rules as those guiding nominating-petition signatures (see " Green Around the Gills, " News and Features, August 16). But former Stein campaign manager Jenny Kastner tells a different story.

" It was totally the campaign’s fault, " says Kastner, who worked for Stein for more than two months before leaving in early June. " It was totally disorganized. It was chaos and disorganization on the part of the Stein campaign. "

As for specifics, Kastner — who previously worked for former Cambridge mayor Ken Reeves, as well as for Chris Gabrieli during his 1998 congressional campaign — maintains that the Stein campaign actually submitted some 6800 signatures, but that the campaign failed to retrieve enough of them from the town halls in time to put them in alphabetical order and deliver them to the state’s Office of Campaign and Political Finance by the June 4 deadline. " The people in charge of organizing the drop-off and pick-up of QC [qualifying contribution] cards to and from local town halls failed to keep records, and the mildly complicated logistics involved got the better of them, " she says. At various times, she claims, Stein volunteers either forgot to get the cards back or were not aware of the deadline to deliver the cards to the state.

Stein disputes Kastner’s account and chalks it up to bitterness on the part of a " disgruntled " former employee. " These were extremely onerous regulations that required basically an unfunded campaign with a skeleton staff to interact with 351 town halls, which were largely unaware of how Clean Elections procedures work, " says Stein. " It is exactly the kind of campaign that Clean Elections was intended to bring into the process. The challenges are very great for exactly that kind of campaign that’s operating on volunteer power. "

There’s no question that the Kastner-Stein debate has the flavor of an employment dispute. But it’s also true that garnering Clean Elections funding was one of the real challenges for the Greens this year — and that they failed to meet the challenge.