ATLANTA – In yet another reversal, votes in Georgia for presidential candidates Cornel West and Claudia De la Cruz will count for now after the Georgia Supreme Court paused orders disqualifying them.
The court's decision Sunday came as Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger's office said military and overseas ballots will be mailed beginning Tuesday with West and De la Cruz listed as candidates.
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This doesn't guarantee that votes for the two will be counted. They could still be disqualified by the state high court, in which case votes for them would be discarded.
West is running as an independent in Georgia. De la Cruz is the nominee for the Party of Socialism and Liberation but she technically qualified for the Georgia ballot as an independent.
Presidential choices for Georgia voters will definitely include Republican Donald Trump, Democrat Kamala Harris, Libertarian Chase Oliver and Green Party nominee Jill Stein, the most candidates since 2000. But if West and De la Cruz are also included, it would be the first time since 1948 that more than four candidates seek Georgia's presidential electors.
Democrats, Republicans and Libertarians automatically qualify for elections in Georgia.
In an interview Friday in the Atlanta suburb of Decatur, before a campaign appearance in nearby Clarkston, De la Cruz said she wasn't “naive” about how hard it would be to put her name before voters, likening efforts to keep her off the ballot to efforts to keep people from voting.
“We know just how undemocratic the electoral system, the so-called democracy of this country is,” De la Cruz said. “We knew that we were going to face challenges here in Georgia., in the South, just generally there’s a history of voter suppression, and I don’t think that we can disconnect voter suppression with what’s happening with ballot access for third party candidates and independent candidates.”
Georgia is one of several states where Democrats and allied groups have filed challenges to third-party and independent candidates, seeking to block candidates who could siphon votes from Harris after President Joe Biden won Georgia by fewer than 12,000 votes in 2020. In Georgia, Democrats argue West and De la Cruz should be denied access because their 16 electors didn't file petitions in their own names.
Republicans in Georgia intervened, seeking to keep all the candidates on the ballot, and the party has pushed to prop up liberal third-party candidates such as West and Stein in battleground states in an effort to hurt Harris.
Those interests have contributed to a flurry of legal activity in Georgia. An administrative law judge disqualified West, De la Cruz, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and the Georgia Green Party from the ballot. Raffensperger, a Republican, overruled the judge, and said West and De la Cruz should get access. He also ruled that under a new Georgia law, Stein should go on Georgia ballots because the national Green Party had qualified her in at least 20 other states.
Kennedy's name stayed off ballots because he withdrew his candidacy in Georgia and a number of other states after suspending his campaign and endorsing Trump.
Superior Court judges in Atlanta then agreed with Democrats who appealed Raffensperger's decisions on West and De la Cruz, disqualifying them and setting the stage for the fight to move to the state Supreme Court.