Pennsylvania State Supreme Court Removes Third-Party Candidates from Presidential Ballots
In an affirmation of a lower court decision, the state of Pennsylvania took the opposite stance of Georgia, but arrived at the same conclusion.
(Pennsylvania State Supreme Court. Image Courtesy of Flickr.com)
In the capital of Pennsylvania, a town called Harrisburg, the state’s supreme court ruled that Claudia de la Cruz of the Party for Socialism and Libertation and James Clymer of the Constitution Party will both be off the ballot for president, affirming a previous lower court ruling.
This ruling is part of Clear Choice PAC and Pennsylvania Democratic Party efforts to disqualify third-party candidates from presidential ballots in as many states as they could. While Clymer was targeted in Pennsylvania and Cornel West was targeted in Georgia, both states have targeted de la Cruz for removal.
At issue in Pennsylvania: seven of de la Cruz’s nineteen electors had been registered as Democrats. They would have had to have been disaffiliated from either of the two major parties for thirty days before they could legally be counted as an elector.
By contrast, Georgia, in which an appellate court ruled de la Cruz is disqualified from the ballot, found that only one elector would be sufficient for her to be on the ballot for president- the opposite of Pennsylvania’s ruling, which insisted all of her electors must be valid.
Karina Garica, de la Cruz’s running mate, said, “Hundreds of unpaid campaign volunteers in Pennsylvania and Georgia spent thousands upon thousands of hours to collect the required signatures for our socialist campaign to gain ballot access and bring our working class message to the people. Democrats and Republicans are spending millions of dollars to campaign aggressively in these two states in the 2024 election. Our campaign believes voters should have more than just two options, and that elections shouldn’t be decided just by who spends the most money on their campaign. This unjust ruling is a blow to democracy.”
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