Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger has overruled the chief state administrative law judge’s orders to disqualify four independent and third-party candidates for president from the ballot.
Earlier this week, Judge Michael Malihi issued orders disqualifying independents Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Cornel West, Green Party candidate Jill Stein and Party for Socialism and Liberation nominee Claudia De la Cruz from the ballot.
But with Raffensperger’s ruling, the final presidential ballot in Georgia will consist of former President Donald Trump (R), Vice President Kamala Harris (D), Libertarian Chase Oliver, Stein, De la Cruz, and West, announced Secretary of State COO Gabriel Sterling in an Aug 29 post on X.
Kennedy has withdrawn his candidacy and will not appear on the ballot, with Raffensperger ruling the challenges to his petition moot.
The Georgia Democratic Party filed the challenges to ballot access against the four independent and third-party candidates and their presidential electors, alleging a variety of technical errors in their qualifying paperwork. Many political observers viewed legal battles over ballot access as a result of the two-party system.
But in a series of orders released today, Raffensperger ruled that West and De La Cruz both qualified for the ballot, because both filed signature petitions with more than the requisite 7,500 signatures as well as slates of electors. Malihi had ruled that because their slates of electors had not separately filed qualifying petitions, they had run afoul of a 2017 state election law.
However, Raffensperfer overruled Malihi, citing superseding federal case law from the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals that says meeting the 7,500 signature threshold with a qualified slate of electors are all that federal law requires for a presidential ballot petition. West submitted 8,075 signatures and De la Cruz submitted 7,682, according to Raffensperger’s orders.
Requiring each candidate’s electors to separately file their own signature petitions “would impose a signature requirement far in excess of that permitted by the court’s decision,” Raffensperger’s order said.
Stein contended that the Green Party was on the ballot in 24 other states, fulfilling a new Georgia law for ballot access if the candidate’s party is on the ballot in at least 20 other states. However, Malihi had disqualified Stein because she could not yet produce official documentation from 20 other states that the Green Party was on the ballot.
In one of his rulings, Raffensperger agreed with Malihi that the Green Party of Georgia had failed to demonstrate ballot access in at least 20 states.
But Raffensperger overruled Malihi’s decision in a separate order, according to Secretary of State’s Office spokesperson Robert Sinners. “The Secretary has made a separate decision that the U.S. Green Party has met the 20-state provision for political bodies under SB 189, and so their candidate Jill Stein will also be on the ballot,” Sinners told Atlanta Civic Circle via text.
While uncommon, it is not without precedent that the Secretary of State disagrees with a judge’s ruling. According to Sterling, that happened during the primary this year.
