Green Party of California

The Green Party of California (GPCA) is a California political party. The party is led by a coordinating committee, and decisions are ultimately made by general assemblies. The GPCA is affiliated with the Green Party of the United States (GPUS).

As of September 5, 2025, there are 113,050 people registered to vote with Green party-preference, 0.49%, the seventh-largest. As of January 2022, there are twenty-nine California Green elected officials, including two elected-mayors and three in municipal councils.

On February 4, 1990, Greens gathered at California State University, Sacramento, authored bylaws, founded the GPCA, and started a voter registration drive. The GPCA adopted the leaf-G logo which cartoonist Harry Driggs designed for the Green Party of San Francisco in the 1980s and which represents the letter G of the party name as a leaf.

On January 2, 1990, a month before foundation, Kent Smith sent notice to the secretary of state that the GPCA intends to qualify for the June 2, 1992 primary elections. At that time, there were 420 people registered to vote with Green preference and, to obtain this qualification, the party needed to have registrations of at least one percent of the vote in the previous gubernatorial general election, on December 31, 1991, the 154th day before the election. Following the 1990 election, this amounted to 78,992 people.

For the voter registration drive, the GPCA had two full-time fundraisers and hired Joe Louis Hoffman as full-time organizer. By November 11, 1991, the party had 50,000 people registered with GPCA preference. Late that November, the party received financial support and was able to pay people for obtaining registrations on a per-registration basis. By 1992, the party registered over 100,000 people with GPCA preference and thereby qualified, which it since has done continuously.

GPCA members used the election qualification to run for offices, each facing the none of the above vote option, and all but one advanced to the general. Roger Donaldson ran for state assembly district 53, later decided against it, and sent out a letter urging voters to vote for none of the above instead of him. The party did not have candidates for the presidential, nor the senatorial races.

Party registrations were down to 91,342 people on October 4, 1993. They must have still been at least 78,992 people on January 4, 1994, for the party was qualified for the June 7, 1994 primary elections.

The 1994 gubernatorial general election was the party’s first opportunity to earn qualification through electoral result. If the party had a candidate running for a statewide-elected office that received at least two percent of the vote, the party would maintain qualification until the next gubernatorial primary, that is if registrations stayed at least one fifteenth of one percent (0.067%) of the statewide total. The GPCA did indeed have a party member, Margaret Garcia, who received 3.8% of the vote in the secretary of state election, 315,079 votes, well over the two percent threshold.