HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) — A federal judge has denied Cornel West’s request to be included in the presidential primary in the key state of Pennsylvania. He expressed sympathy for his claim, but said it was too close to Election Day to make any 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 state election restrictions to West.
“The laws, as applied to him and based on the court record, appear designed to restrict access to ballots for him (and other non-major political candidates) for reasons that are not entirely compelling or tailored, and therefore appear to violate the US Constitution,” Ranjan wrote.
West, a liberal academic who is currently a professor of philosophy and Christian practice at Union Theological Seminary in New York, would likely pull many more votes away from Democratic nominee Vice President Kamala Harris than from the Republican nominee, former President Donald Trump. West’s lawyers in the case have deep Republican ties.
“Had this case been brought earlier, the outcome, at least on the current record, might have been different,” Ranjan wrote in denying the request for a temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction.
An appeal will be filed immediately, West attorney Matt Haverstick said Friday.
“This is a situation where, given constitutional rights, I think access to ballots is better than no access to ballots,” Haverstick said. “We would be happy if Dr. West would appear on some ballots, or even if a message appeared at the 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 correct outcome, but that Schmidt “respectfully” disagrees with the judge’s view of his office’s enforcement of the election code. Heckel noted that state courts had previously sided with the State Department.
“One of the dangers of such last-minute lawsuits is that courts do not have sufficient time to review the law when making their decisions,” Heckel wrote.
Ranjan cited federal precedent that courts should not interfere with upcoming elections without a strong reason to do so. He said it is too late to reprint ballots and retest election machines without increasing the risk of errors.
The judge ruled that placing West on the ballot at this point “would undoubtedly cause voter confusion, as well as likely post-election litigation over how to count votes cast by newly printed mail-in ballots.”
West, his running mate in the Justice for All Party and three voters sued Schmidt and the State Department on September 25 in federal court in Pittsburgh, arguing that the department’s interpretation of the election law violates their constitutional rights to liberty of association and equal protection. Specifically, they challenged the requirement that West’s presidential electors — the people poised to vote for West in the Electoral College — should have submitted candidate affidavits.
In court testimony Monday, West said he was seeking “equal protection of votes.”
“When you ultimately lose the integrity of a process, when you create 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 fourteen U.S. Senate votes against him, including that of Harris, then a senator from California, were cast by Democrats.
