Judge disqualifies Cornel West and Claudia De la Cruz from running for president in Georgia

ATLANTA (AP) — Presidential candidates Cornel West and Claudia De la Cruz are disqualified from running for president in Georgia, two state court judges ruled Wednesday, saying that their electors didn’t file the proper paperwork.

For now at least, the decision means votes for West and De la Cruz won’t be counted in Georgia, even if their names remain on ballots because it’s too late to remove them. Military and overseas ballots are scheduled to be mailed starting Tuesday.

Fulton County Superior Court Judges Thomas A. Cox Jr. and Emily Richardson ordered the state to post notices in polling places warning that West and De la Cruz had been disqualified and that votes for them would be void if their names still appear, a common remedy in Georgia for late election changes.

West has been running as an independent in Georgia. De la Cruz is the nominee for the Party of Socialism and Liberation but technically qualified for the Georgia ballot as an independent.

If the rulings stand, presidential choices for Georgia voters will include Republican Donald Trump, Democrat Kamala Harris, Libertarian Chase Oliver and Green Party nominee Jill Stein, the most candidates since 2000.

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

Spokespersons for West and De la Cruz said they would appeal the decision to the Georgia Supreme Court.

“We are confident that we will win the appeal,” Edwin DeJesus with the West campaign wrote in an email.

“We are appealing this decision which negates basic democratic rights of the people of Georgia to vote for the candidate of their choice,” Estevan Hernandez, co-chair of De la Cruz’s campaign in Georgia, said in a statement. “This is the result of the effort by the Democratic Party to sabotage democratic rights of Georgia voters at the very moment that they say that the 2024 election is about democracy itself.”

Wednesday’s rulings were 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.

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“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.

Richardson made a similar ruling against De la Cruz.

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.