ATLANTA– In a new reversal, Georgia votes for presidential candidates Cornel West and Claudia De la Cruz will continue to count for now after the Georgia Supreme Court stayed the candidates’ disqualification decisions.
The court’s ruling came Sunday after Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s office announced that military and overseas ballots would be mailed out starting Tuesday, naming West and De la Cruz as candidates.
This does not guarantee that votes for the two will be counted. They can still be disqualified by the state Supreme Court, in which case votes for them will be thrown out.
West is running as an independent in Georgia. De la Cruz is the nominee for the Party of Socialism and Liberation, but she technically qualified for the Georgia ballot as an independent.
Georgia’s presidential candidates are certain to select Republican Donald Trump, Democrat Kamala Harris, Libertarian Chase Oliver and Green Party candidate Jill Stein as their presidential nominees. That’s the most candidates since 2000. But if West and De la Cruz join the race, it would be the first time since 1948 that more than four candidates have run for president in Georgia.
Democrats, Republicans and Libertarians automatically qualify to run for election in Georgia.
In an interview Friday in the Atlanta suburb of Decatur, ahead of a campaign appearance in nearby Clarkston, De la Cruz said she wasn’t “naive” about how difficult it would be to get her name in front of voters. She compared efforts to keep her off the ballot to efforts to stop people from voting.
“We know how undemocratic the electoral system, the so-called democracy of this country is,” De la Cruz said. “We knew we were going to have challenges here in Georgia. There’s just a history of voter suppression in the South, and I don’t think we can separate voter suppression from what’s happening with ballot access for third-party candidates and independent candidates.”
Georgia is one of several states where Democrats and allied groups have filed objections to third-party and independent candidates in an attempt to block candidates who could steal votes from Harris after President Joe Biden won Georgia by fewer than 12,000 votes in 2020. In Georgia, Democrats argue that West and De la Cruz should be barred because their 16 electors did not file petitions in their own names.
Georgia Republicans intervened and tried to keep all candidates on the ballot, and the party has tried to support liberal third-party candidates like West and Stein. in states where the struggle is for victory in an attempt to hurt Harris.
Those interests have contributed to a flood of legal activity in Georgia. administrative judge disqualified West, De la Cruz, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.and the Georgia Green Party from the ballot. Raffensperger, a Republican, overruled the judge and said West and De la Cruz should be allowed access. He also ruled that under a new law of Georgia, Stein should be on the Georgia ballot because the national Green Party had qualified her in at least 20 other states.
Kennedy’s name remained off the ballots because he withdrew his candidacy in Georgia and several other states after suspend his campaign and support Trump.
Supreme Court justices in Atlanta then agreed with Democrats appealing Raffensperger’s decisions on West and De la Cruz, disqualify them and set the stage for the battle to take to the state Supreme Court.