West Virginia Law that Clearly Bans “Sore Losers” Doesn’t Go Into Effect in Time to Block Don Blankenship

The 2018 West Virginia legislature passed HB 4434, to make it clear that people who lose a primary (for office other than president) can’t petition onto the general election ballot. See this story, which says that it doesn’t go into effect for 90 days after it was signed. It was signed on March 22, so it won’t be in effect until late June.

But Don Blankenship, who ran for U.S. Senate in the Republican primary for U.S. Senate this year, might want to petition as an independent. Whether the old law would block him is not clear.


Comments

West Virginia Law that Clearly Bans “Sore Losers” Doesn’t Go Into Effect in Time to Block Don Blankenship — 8 Comments

  1. How many separate and unequal classes / combinations of ballot access laws are there — due to the gerrymander oligarchs ???

    10 – 20 – 30 – 40 – more ???


    NO primaries.

    PR and AppV

  2. Don Blankenship ran in the Republican primary, not the Democratic one.

  3. Leonardo is correct. The Trump-on-Steroids ex-felon — a guy who claimed he was more “Trumpian” than the current imbecile in the White House — sought the Republican nomination, not the Democratic nomination.

  4. Don just registered (online) into the Constitution Party on Saturday May 19. Thus he will have been in the party 60 days as of July 19 which is a week and a half before the minor party filing deadline (August 1). That part of the election law will be easily satisfied.

    The June 7 effective date is in two weeks. As long as he begins his petitioning process before then, he should be able to be grandfathered in. IIRC, the Mountain Party was grandfathered in with the lower 1% petition signature requirement in 2000 because they had already begun petitioning before the new and thankfully short-lived 2% requirement (1999-2009) went into effect.

  5. I have done further research into our state election code on this and must retract my previous comment. The effective date of this year’s “sore loser” legislation, House Bill 4434, is irrelevant because it is just a styling change to replace the words of some section numbers (in last-year’s added clause “f”) with numerals. The sloppy language in §3-5-23 regarding “are not already candidates” and its tense, which should technically be “were already,” has been in the code since at least 1993. As Phil mentioned, any legal action will need to be taken in federal court where the INTENT (not the specific words) of this law will be argued on First Amendment constitutional grounds. Judge Napolitano agrees. THIS is how Don Blankenship’s case will be won.

  6. Darcy G Richardson, Don Blankenship was NEVER convicted of any felony. He was given the maximum 1-year sentence for an arbitrary misdemeanor and imprisoned with over 1000 felons where he was the only one there with a misdemeanor. I say “arbitrary” because it was based on a mathematical calculation concerning how many employees he had. Please read his free booklet for full info: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3123328-Blankenship-Political-Prisoner-Booklet.html

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