HARRISBURG, Pennsylvania – Democrats in Pennsylvania have won court battles to keep the left-leaning Socialism and Liberation Party off the presidential ballot in the swing state, at least for now. At the same time, a lawyer with close ties to the Republican Party is campaigning to get independent candidate Cornel West on the ballot.
The lawsuits are part of a series of partisan legal maneuvers involving third-party candidates seeking to get on Pennsylvania’s ballot, including a pending Democratic challenge to independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s filing in Pennsylvania.
A Commonwealth Court judge on Tuesday upheld two Democratic Party appeals, ruling that the paperwork filed by the Socialism and Liberation Party contained serious defects and barring the party’s presidential candidate, Claudia De la Cruz, from running in Pennsylvania’s Nov. 5 election.
Seven of the party’s 19 presidential electors named in the filing were registered as Democrats, violating a political segregation provision of the law, Judge Bonnie Brigance Leadbetter wrote. Six of them had voted in the Democratic Party’s April 23 primary.
“They literally voted in the Democratic primary and then tried to serve as electors for a third-party candidate,” said Adam Bonin, a Democratic attorney who filed one of the lawsuits. “That’s not OK.”
The Party for Socialism and Liberation announced it would appeal and accused the Democrats and their allies in a statement of “seeking every conceivable bureaucratic formality to exclude their opponents from participating.”
Meanwhile, a lawyer with longstanding ties to Republican candidates and causes argued in court that the Secretary of State’s office under Democratic Governor Josh Shapiro wrongly rejected West’s records.
“I see no good reason to disqualify Mr. West from the ballot or otherwise discourage Pennsylvanians from voting for him,” attorney Matt Haverstick said in an interview. Haverstick declined to say who hired him or why.
The Secretary of State’s office is denying the legal challenge, arguing that the filings lacked the required affidavits for 14 of the 19 presidential electors before the Aug. 1 filing deadline. Across the country, there is a broader effort by conservative activists and Republican-aligned activists to advance the left-wing academic’s candidacy.
The election on November 5, in which Republican candidate Donald Trump and Democratic candidate Kamala Harris will compete, is likely to be close in Pennsylvania. With 19 electoral votes, Pennsylvania is tied for fifth place with Illinois and is probably the state with the most votes awarded of all swing states.
Republicans and Democrats view third-party candidates as a threat that could drain crucial support from their nominees – especially given that Pennsylvania went to Democrat Joe Biden in 2020 and Trump in 2016 by margins of tens of thousands of votes.
Jill Stein of the Green Party and Chase Oliver of the Libertarian Party filed petitions to get unopposed on the Pennsylvania presidential ballot.
The Democratic challenge to Kennedy is still pending, as is the Republican challenge to the Constitution Party. The Republicans have already won a challenge to the American Solidarity Party candidate.
In his challenge to De la Cruz, the judge cited a provision in state law that requires minor party candidates not to be registered with a major political party within 30 days of that year’s primary election.
Leadbetter, who was elected as a Republican, said it was clear that seven of the party’s 19 named presidential electors were registered as Democrats both before and after Pennsylvania’s April 23 primary.
De la Cruz’s lawyers argued that the party could either appoint new electors or simply accept 12 of Pennsylvania’s 19 electoral votes instead.
But Leadbetter wrote that Pennsylvania law does not allow for post-term replacement in such cases, and that the U.S. Constitution provides for a specific proportional representation system for the states in the Electoral College. So awarding fewer electoral votes, even in a single state, would undermine that principle of proportionality.
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Follow Marc Levy at https://x.com/timelywriter.
