On August 21, U.S. District Court Judge John E. Jones, a Bush Jr. appointee, upheld the decision of Pennsylvania’s elections department last year to exclude Rocky De La Fuente from the general election ballot, on the grounds that De La Fuente had run in the Democratic presidential primary. De La Fuente v Cortes, 1:16cv-1696. Here is the 23-page decision.
The decision did not even acknowledge the major points made by De La Fuente. The decision says that because the U.S. Supreme Court upheld California’s similar law in 1974 in Storer v Brown, therefore Pennsylvania was correct to bar him from the general election ballot. But Storer v Brown did not relate to presidential elections. The decision does not even mention the point that the true candidates in a presidential election are the presidential elector candidates. Nor does it mention the point that no state’s presidential primary actually nominates anyone. Most of the decision deals with procedural points and says that De La Fuente has standing. The part of the decision on the merits is only five pages long.
Although the decision mentions U.S. Term Limits v Thornton, the 1995 U.S. Supreme Court ruling saying states cannot add to the constitutional qualifications for federal office, it merely says that the issue in that case was different. It does not grapple with the point that the principle is the same. In the term limits case, the Supreme Court said states can’t keep someone off the ballot because of his or her prior political behavior. That principle should apply to sore loser laws for federal office as well. Furthermore, Jones wrote that in the term limits case, the Arkansas law “placed an outright ban on candidates who had already served three terms in the House.” That is not true. The Arkansas law let such candidates run for re-election; they merely had to be write-in candidates.
The decision also upholds a Pennsylvania law that says no one can circulate a primary petition if the circulator is not a member of the candidate’s party. A U.S. District Court in Connecticut had struck down an identical law in Connecticut last year, and the new Pennsylvania decision does not mention the Connecticut precedent. It does mention a New York precedent that upheld a similar restriction.