Andy Ellis carefully filled out paperwork to run for governor of Maryland on Monday, scribbling his signature and posing for pictures in front of an American flag at the state elections office in Annapolis.

He knows it’s unlikely that he’ll win.

Ellis has been a volunteer leader of Maryland’s on-again, off-again Green Party for a decade, and is seeking the party’s nomination for governor next year. He and his running mate, Owen Silverman Andrews, acknowledge they’ve got little shot at unseating incumbent Democratic Gov. Wes Moore.

But that doesn’t mean they don’t have other important goals.

“I would love it if we were the next governor and lieutenant governor,” Ellis said outside the state elections office in Annapolis on Monday. “But I am a student of history and political science. ... We’re not going to go and set expectations that we don’t think we can meet.”

Ellis and Andrews hope to get 100,000 votes, or roughly 4% of the total vote, if turnout goes as expected next year.

That would beat the best showing by a third-party gubernatorial candidate since the Civil War, the 3.2% vote share earned by the Prohibition Party’s Joshua Levering, who finished third in the 1895 race for governor that was won by Republican Lloyd Lowndes Jr.

Getting a 4% share would serve another benefit to the Green Party, allowing them to remain recognized as an official party and have access to be on the ballot.

For the past several cycles, when the Green Party’s top-of-the-ticket candidates failed to achieve at least a 1% share, the party lost its recognition. Volunteers have had to fan out across the state to collect 10,000 signatures from registered voters to restore the party’s status.

If Green Party volunteers can skip the task of collecting signatures, they can focus their energy instead on campaigning for candidates and advocating for their issues.

“Getting 1% releases all of that activist time and energy back into communities where those activists will have an impact. ... We will have a ripple effect of really committed organizers advocating for the improvement of their communities,” Andrews said.

The Ellis-Andrews ticket also will work to qualify for public campaign financing. If they obtain $120,000 in donations from 1,500 Marylanders, capped at $250 each, it would unlock a state-funded match of cash to use in their campaign.

Former Republican Gov. Larry Hogan used a prior version of public financing for his upset win in 2014, and Democrat Rushern Baker used public financing in his unsuccessful bid for governor in 2022.

The Green Party candidates also hope to be invited to participate in major gubernatorial debates, and they believe that qualifying for public financing would prove to debate planners — particularly at Maryland Public Television, which has specific criteria for debate participation — that there’s interest in their campaign and issues.

“We think that if Marylanders are able to see and hear us, and see and hear our positions, then we’re more likely to achieve that top-line goal,” Andrews said.

On the campaign trail, Ellis and Andrews plan to focus on four values: peace, justice, ecology and democracy. Top-polling issues like the economy, housing affordability and energy prices fall under those values, Ellis said.

Not only do the two main parties — Republicans and Democrats — have a stranglehold on elected offices, the Democrats significantly outnumber Republicans in Maryland’s most populous counties.

In the Maryland General Assembly, Democrats hold more than two-thirds of the seats. Gerrymandering of the districts reinforces the status quo in Annapolis by affording incumbents easy paths to reelection, Ellis said.

“There’s not that much incentive for a lot of them to be responsive to their voters,” Ellis said.

The path for third-party success is a difficult one. In the last gubernatorial election, members of the Libertarian Party were hopeful that their candidate, David Lashar, might siphon some votes away from Republican nominee Dan Cox, who had been endorsed by President Donald Trump. Lashar only ended up with 1.5% of the vote.

The Green Party ticket of Nancy Wallace and running mate Patrick Elder earned 0.73% of the vote in 2022.

Ellis and Andrews started their campaign modestly. They invited a couple of news outlets to their candidacy filing appointment on Monday, and before that, hosted a campaign launch party in Andrews’ backyard over the weekend.

They hit their fundraising goal for the event: $2,026.