Judge disqualifies Cornel West from running for president in Georgia

ATLANTA (AP) — A Georgia state court judge on Wednesday disqualified independent presidential candidate Cornel West from running for president in the state, ruling that West’s electors didn’t file the proper paperwork.

For now at least, the decision means votes for West won’t be counted in Georgia, although his name will remain on ballots because the judge said it’s too late to remove it.

Fulton County Superior Court Judge Thomas A. Cox ruled it was too late to order new ballots printed, with military and overseas ballots scheduled to be mailed starting Tuesday. Instead, Cox ordered the state to post notices in polling places warning West had been disqualified and votes for him would be void, a common remedy in Georgia for late election changes.

A ruling was also expected late Wednesday on whether Claudia De la Cruz could stay on Georgia ballots. The nominee for the Party of Socialism and Liberation technically qualified for the Georgia ballot as an independent, but Democrats have argued she should be excluded for the same reason that applied to West.

Beyond De la Cruz, presidential choices for Georgia voters will include Republican Donald Trump, Democrat Kamala Harris, Libertarian Chase Oliver and Green Party nominee Jill Stein. That total of five candidates would be the most since 1948.

Democrats, Republicans and Libertarians automatically qualify for elections in Georgia.

Lawyers for West and for Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger did not immediately say whether they would appeal.

Wednesday’s ruling was the latest turn in the on-again, off-again saga of ballot access for independent and third-party candidates in Georgia. An administrative law judge disqualified West, De la Cruz, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and the Georgia Green Party from the ballot. But Raffensperger, who gets the last word in such matters, overruled the judge, and said West and De la Cruz should get access.

Raffensperger also ruled that under a new Georgia law, Stein should go on Georgia ballots because the national Green Party had qualified her in at least 20 other states.

Kennedy’s name stayed off ballots because he withdrew his candidacy in Georgia and a number of other states after suspending his campaign and endorsing Trump.

Democrats appealed Raffensperger’s decisions on West and De la Cruz and filed a fresh action challenging his decision on Stein, seeking to block candidates who could siphon votes from Harris after Joe Biden won Georgia by fewer than 12,000 votes in 2020.

Cox dismissed the Democratic challenge to Stein’s inclusion on Wednesday. He wrote that Raffensperger “has a clear legal duty to allow the Unified Green Party to qualify candidates for presidential elector and to allow those candidates access to the Nov. 4, 2024 General Election ballot.” If Democrats want to contest the issue further, they should do so before an administrative law judge, Cox wrote.

The judge agreed with Democratic arguments that under state law, at least one of West’s electors should have filed a petition with the required 7,500 signatures from registered voters in their own name. Instead, the petition was filed only in West’s name.

“While Dr. West only needed a single presidential elector to properly qualify to provide him with ballot access, none of his candidates satisfied the requirements to do so,” Cox wrote.

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Georgia is one of several states where Democrats and allied groups have filed challenges to third-party and independent candidates.

Republicans in Georgia intervened, seeking to keep all the candidates on the ballot. That’s just one push in a Republican effort across battleground states to prop up liberal third-party candidates such as West and Stein in an effort to hurt Harris. It’s not clear who’s paying for the effort. But it could matter in states decided by minuscule margins in the 2020 election.