HARRISBURG, Pa. – A federal judge has turned down Cornel West's request to be included on the presidential ballot in the key battleground state of Pennsylvania, expressing sympathy for his claim but saying it's too close to Election Day to make changes.
U.S. District Judge J. Nicholas Ranjan said in an order issued late Thursday that he has “serious concerns” about how Pennsylvania Secretary of State Al Schmidt is applying restrictions in state election code to West.
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“The laws, as applied to him and based on the record before the court, appear to be designed to restrict ballot access to him (and other non-major political candidates) for reasons that are not entirely weighty or tailored, and thus appear to run afoul of the U.S. Constitution,” Ranjan wrote.
West, a liberal academic currently serving as professor of philosophy and Christian practice at Union Theological Seminary in New York, would likely draw far more votes away from Democratic nominee Vice President Kamala Harris than from the Republican candidate, former President Donald Trump. West's lawyers in the case have deep Republican ties.
“If this case had been brought earlier, the result, at least on the present record, may have been different,” Ranjan wrote in turning down the request for a temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction.
An appeal will be filed immediately, West lawyer Matt Haverstick said Friday.
“This is a situation where I think, given the constitutional rights, that any ballot access is better than no ballot access,” Haverstick said. “We'd be content if Dr. West got on some ballots, or even if there was a notification posted at polling places that he was on the ballot.”
Matt Heckel, press secretary for the Pennsylvania Department of State, said in an email that Ranjan reached the right outcome but that Schmidt “respectfully” disagrees with the judge's opinion regarding his agency’s enforcement of the election code. Heckel noted state courts had previously sided with the Department of State.
“One of the dangers of such last-minute litigation is that courts do not have adequate time to review the law in making their decisions,” Heckel wrote.
Ranjan cited federal precedent that courts should not disrupt imminent elections without a powerful reason for doing so. He said it was too late to reprint ballots and retest election machines without increasing the risk of error.
Putting West on the ballot at this point, the judge ruled, “would unquestionably cause voter confusion, as well as likely post-election litigation about how to count votes cast by any newly printed mail-in ballots."
West, his running mate in the Justice for All Party and three voters sued Schmidt and the Department of State in federal court in Pittsburgh on Sept. 25, arguing the department's interpretation of election law violates their constitutional rights to freedom of association and equal protection. Specifically, they challenged a requirement that West's presidential electors — the people ready to cast votes for West in the Electoral College — should have filed candidate affidavits.
In court testimony Monday, West said he was aiming for “equal protection of voices.”
“In the end, when you lose the integrity of a process, in the end, when you generate distrust in public life, it reinforces spiritual decay, it reinforces moral decadence,” West testified.
Ranjan was nominated to the court by Trump in 2019. All 14 U.S. Senate votes against him, including that of Harris, then a senator from California, were cast by Democrats.