On August 19, the staff of the Wisconsin Elections Commission recommended to the Commission that both Howie Hawkins and Kanye West be omitted from the November ballot as presidential candidates. The Hawkins petition doesn’t have enough valid signatures when the sheets showing the out-of-date postal address for the vice-presidential nominee are omitted.
The West petition was deemed to have been submitted after 5 p.m.
This story has a link to the commission recommendations. The Hawkins petition discussion starts at page 34. On August 20, the Elections Commission will decide whether to omit one or both candidates.
Howie Hawkins and Kanye West should both be put on the WI ballot. These are stupid reason for disqualifying them.
Thanks for this link. I read the underlying staff recommendations and they are saying that Jorgensen/Cohen did submit enough signatures and that they are recommending that they be placed on the ballot. I’m assuming that their position on the ballot won’t be official until the commission meets tomorrow. Is their placement on the ballot at this point a mere formality, or is there any chance that they cod be denied s ballot line?
Wisconsin is a state that would benefit by using ranked choice or approval voting. All these nit-picky games to disqualify candidates from the ballot are driven by the motivation to force a bipolar choice on the voters that keeps plurality voting credible.
Cody, Republicans have been just a vicious as Democrats when it comes to keeping minor parties and independents off of ballots.
I agree 100% on that too, yet this year it’s largely the Democrats that are doing this- and for a party that’s supposed to be 100% supportive of American Democracy and vehemently anti-fascist and for advancing the civil rights & liberties of all Americans -it smacks of vivid hypocrisy and laughable double standards.
If there’s one thing that gets my Irish boiling mad; it’s not hypocrisy but Self-Righteous Hypocrisy -and that is exactly what the Democratic Party is today.
May they crash & burn this upcoming election.
Andy, Democrats have a far worse record than Republicans on trying to get minor party and independent candidates off the ballot. The Democratic Party has done this in presidential elections in 1936, 1948, 1976, 1980, and especially 2004, and now 2020. Republicans have not done that, except in 2008 Pennsylvania Republicans challenged Libertarian presidential nominee Bob Barr.
The hypocrisy of the Democratic Party is overwhelming. In 1984 the national Democratic convention passed a resolution saying no duty of the party is greater than defending voting rights. And yet they are opponents of voting rights for voters who want to vote for various alternate candidates.
This is not true. What about Republicans challenging in PA in 2012? Also, who can forget what was perhaps the most vicious challenge of all time, when Republicans in Illinois challenged the LP’s petition in 2014, when they sent armed security guards to the home of every petition signer to try to get them to say they wanted their signature taken off the petition?
Republicans have been behind efforts in state legislatures to make ballot access more difficult for minor parties (see Aruzona), or to block easing ballot access for minor parties (see Tennessee).
This is the WEC telling West that the blatant fraud in his application is not their problem if he agrees to go away. As for the Greens, Jill Stein and Ralph Nader cast long shadows over their activities (as also shown today in Montana).
The corrupt, totalitarian Democratic Party is deeply scared of letting voters have any other options on the ballot. They believe that they own all non-Republican voters’ votes. That is why they try so hard to push the Greens (and others) off the ballot at every opportunity.
ALL of these ballot games that major parties are the DIRECT and INEVITABLE consequence of plurality voting. Any third party or independent challenger is an EXISTENTIAL danger to them under FIRST PAST THE POST voting.