On August 30, U.S. District Court W. Keith Watkins upheld the action of the Alabama Secretary of State in 2016, when he put Rocky De La Fuente on the November ballot as an independent candidate for president, and then a few weeks later noticed that De La Fuente had appeared on the Democratic presidential primary ballot that year, and removed him.
The decision is only seven pages. Judge Watkins tried to explain why U.S. Term Limits v Thornton, the 1995 U.S. Supreme Court that said states cannot add to the constitutional qualifications to run for Congress, does not apply to “sore loser” laws. He wrote, “At root, the sore loser law regulates how to access the ballot, not who can access it.”
One could have made the same argument to uphold congressional term limits. One could have said, in defense of state laws barring ballot access to candidates who had already been elected to three terms in Congress, that the law only regulates access to the ballot. One could have said the way to access the ballot is not to have already been elected to Congress three times.
The fifth, ninth, and tenth circuits have all ruled that barring congressional candidates from the ballot because they are not registered to vote is impermissible. But applying Judge Watkins’ argument, one could have said that a law requiring a candidate to be registered to vote is only a law telling the candidate how to access the ballot, not a qualification. Judge Watkins did not mention the three circuit decisions striking down laws requiring congressional candidates to be registered voters.
The decision says nothing about the fact that Lyndon LaRouche had run in the 1992 Democratic presidential primary in Alabama, and had also been allowed to appear on the general election ballot as an independent that year, even though the sore loser law had existed back then.
The decision says nothing about the fact that the true candidates being voted on by the voters in a presidential general election are the candidates for presidential elector, not presidential candidates.