Michigan Secretary of State Removes Cornel West from the Ballot

On August 16, the Michigan Secretary of State ruled that independent presidential candidate Cornel West should be removed from the ballot, even though he has enough valid signatures.  The Secretary of State says his declaration of candidacy was not notarized properly.  See this story.


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Michigan Secretary of State Removes Cornel West from the Ballot — 18 Comments

  1. https://www.dispatch.com/story/news/politics/elections/2024/08/15/redistricting-issue-backers-draft-ballot-language-would-rig-election/74718586007/

    Ohio Ballot Board OKs language for redistricting issue; backers plan to challenge it
    Jessie BalmertErin Glynn
    Cincinnati Enquirer
    The Ohio Ballot Board voted 3 to 2 on Friday to certify ballot language for a redistricting amendment to the Ohio Constitution on the November ballot. Supporters of the issue plan to challenge the wording saying it will deceive voters.
    —-
    GOP HACKS RIG GERRYMANDER QUESTION ON BALLOTS

  2. The Democrats really are terrified, huh? All 3rd party candidates pull from the Democrats, even the libertarian candidate this cycle.

  3. WZ 12:17 PM

    ABOUT 40 DAYS FROM NOV E DAY TO DEC EC VOTE DAY— USA CONST 2-1-4

    HOW MANY ZILLION COMMIE/FASCIST FOLKS WOULD ALLEGEDLY MOVE TO MICH AND TRY AND GET REGISTERED ???

    IE APPARENTLY NOOOO EC RUNOFFS ALLOWED ???

  4. @Term Limits NY, because he had fundamental disagreements with the Party and I don’t think he could have won the nomination. I’m surprised he didn’t try to get the Michigan Working Class Party’s nomination. The WCP rarely, if ever, puts up a presidential candidate, but they are running candidates in the 1st, 3rd, 8th, 9th, 10th, 12th, and 13th Congressional districts. They don’t have a candidate for the Senate even though the Natural Law Party does. Natural Law picked Kennedy for their presidential candidate. The WCP is the only Michigan Party left that doesn’t have a presidential candidate and they are the resident Socialist party.

    It is always easier to get a 3rd party’s endorsement in Michigan than to try to get a petition done. The Secretary of State LOVES claiming that signatures are fake on petitions despite most of them coming from college campuses in my opinion. Though, that might be the problem: out-of-stater students trying to sign Michigan petitions. Either way, Senate candidates, especially GOP ones, get their petitions tossed in the trash a lot, disturbingly often. That’s why James Craig couldn’t run in the 2022 Senate race.

  5. AX wrote:

    “ABOUT 40 DAYS FROM NOV E DAY TO DEC EC VOTE DAY— USA CONST 2-1-4

    “HOW MANY ZILLION COMMIE/FASCIST FOLKS WOULD ALLEGEDLY MOVE TO MICH AND TRY AND GET REGISTERED ??”

    Approval, proportional ranked choice, or cumulative voting would solve this problem, but these alternative methods of voting do not have enough wide spread support yet. Several states already have experience with run-off voting, so it appears to have a greater acceptance level at this point.

  6. @AZ, WZ,

    In 1796 and 1800 the Tennessee legislature chose three persons from each county. This body then chose the presidential electors from Tennessee.

    Michigan (or any state) could have a popular election to choose the members of the Presidential Elector Appointment Body. This body would meet in November to appoint the presidential electors.

    p.s. When was the last time anyone moved to Michigan for **any** reason? 1950’s?

  7. Jeff,

    1) It’s not clear who Kennedy and Oliver pull more from.

    If you look at Kennedy’s lifelong views and political activity, the bulk of the issue stances on his website, or the fact that he was originally running in D primaries this cycle, logically he should pull more from Harris. But voters don’t necessarily base their support on issue stances, or have an accurate grasp of what candidates issue stances even are. There’s some weird delusional thinking among right leaning independent and minor party supporters that Kennedy is one of them based on a very small number of isolated issue stances. Polls, looking at the issue views/voting or support history/ other candidates preferences of vocal Kennedy supporters show that this type of delusional thinking is widespread enough to quite possibly be the bulk of his current likely/probable support. Whether it ends up being where most of his actual votes will come from remains to be seen, and will be determined by how the horse race between the two horse’s asses who actually have a statistically significant chance of winning (as in doesn’t round down to 0%) shapes up in the next couple of months.

    Oliver is somewhat left leaning compared to past LP presidential nominees, and very left leaning compared to national party membership. But the bulk of his vote might well come from people who would rank Trump above Harris if ranked voting was a thing, simply because he is running as a Libertarian if nothing else. His campaign isn’t prominent enough to redefine that word in the minds of most voters. A very, very small portion pay enough attention to either Oliver or L.P. internal minutia to even know he’s to the left of past nominees or national leadership. His votes will most likely come primarily from people whose fuzzy mental picture of what he and his party stand for is defined more by other people publicly identified as libertarians have said, regardless of their having any involvement or lack thereof with the LP – Ron and Rand Paul, Neal Boortz, Glenn Beck, and many others – than anything the LP in the current year or Oliver or his campaign say or do.

    2) The Democrats aren’t terrified. Current indications are that Harris is more likely to win than Trump, and minor parties and independents individually or collectively are unlikely to pull enough votes to swing the battleground states. But that could easily change, and the Democrats are ruthless in precluding the possibility that they might swing it against them because they have severe chronic Trump derangement syndrome and fail to recognize or acknowledge their own dictatorial and tyrannical tendencies, which ironically they demonstrate by trying to keep minor parties and independents off the ballot, earlier trying to remove Trump from the ballot, and in many other ways.

    2) Cornell West has only trivial issue differences with the Greens, if any. He’s running as an independent because they wouldn’t guarantee him the nomination ahead of time, although he almost certainly could have won it easily if he hadn’t switched his prior plan to run as a Green. And, in related matters, because he’s an overgrown petulant child, which is very typical for Marxist academics and activists like himself.

  8. Correction, compared to current national party leadership, not membership. L.P. Membership can be defined in various different ways, and there’s no easy way to measure their issue stances. The party’s platform is primarily the product of a tiny handful of people who spend a lot of time and money going to their state and national conventions and an even more insanely inordinate amount of time arguing over platform planks at those conventions and online. Who yaps the loudest online is never a good way to measure majority opinion. Who steps forward as a candidate, or wins nominations for any office where contested (most are not) has a lot more to do with money and organising than with majority opinion. And that’s before you get to the question of what an LP member even is.

  9. I guess since I wasted that much time explaining all that I may as well waste some more.

    Some people define L.P. members as registered L.P. Voters, which is an option in some states and not others. In some states it’s listed on registration forms while in others it’s only available as a write in. Of the states that do have this registration option, how long they’ve had it varies. Some states have it sporadically in some years and not others depending on election performance, and among those some automatically convert existing LP registrations to independent whenever they fall below party status retention thresholds while others just take them off the forms for new registrations and updates while leaving existing registrants as they are.

    Other people define LP members as people who have signed the party’s carry ambiguous membership pledge and have not gone to the unusual length of formally revoking that signature. The database of those people is littered with dead people, duplicates, and especially people who supported the LP enough to sign that statement at some point in their lives but have in most cases long since moved on, or at least no longer support them enough to send them any money.

    That brings us to a third definition: current dues paying supporting members plus lifetime members. That’s the definition most l.p. activists usually mean when they say LP member, at least in my experience. Many are only dimly if at all aware any other definition even exists.

    But even that’s still murky, because the national party and state parties maintain separate but partially overlapping memberships.

    Another functional informal definition of LP Membership is who yaps the loudest at LP national and state conventions, at (usually monthly) local dinner club party bitchfests, and most of all online and on social media, where the vast bulk of LP “Activism” actually takes place. This “activism” consists primarily of internal faction fights and arguing over anything and everything, but most of all about what and who is or isn’t libertarian as well as things that sound like Martian or don’t matter to average voters.

    The real point of all this endless bickering is establishing and maintaining social club pecking order hierarchies, delusionally avoiding real world facts and what actually matters to most voters and is politically achievable in favor of highly theoretical speculation about utopian ideals and speculative scenarios, cosplay political activity as a masturbatory substitute for real world relevance, misplaced Machiavellianism, reinforcing delusional views about the world and political strategy in the face of cognitive dissonance through endless repetition and arguing, seeking a place to make up for childhood bullying and lack of sexual/economic/social success from behind the relative/imagined safety of screens, chasing rabbits down holes and good time and money after bad, charlatanism, self promotion, attention whoring, peacocking, and various related mental health problems. Oh, and just trolling for lulz.

    All of these very different sets of people have different views, but only the last one is usually misinterpreted as the average viewpoint of most party members (whatever that means) most often by most of the few people who care.

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