GOP lawmaker: The messy, inconsistent denial of Cornel West’s ballot bid | Opinion
North Carolina law gives all North Carolinians the right to vote and choose from a range of parties. It is a broad law set up intentionally to expand the range of parties on the ballot.
When members of the State Board of Elections try to find a conflict in state law that does not exist — as Democratic members did July 16 when they denied the Justice for All Party access to the November ballot — they are making their own muddle. In a 3-2 vote, the three Democrats on the 5-member board rejected a bid by third-party presidential candidate Cornel West’s Justice for All party to be put on the 2024 ballot. West’s party has now sued the state board, and Tuesday a U.S. District Court judge said he’ll rule quickly in the case originally filed by three Fayetteville voters who want to vote for West.
It appears State Board of Elections members may have rejected a party that could take votes from Democrats this fall and invited Democrats to sue over the approval of another party, and they did so at the insistence of outside actors with clear ties to the Democrats’ presumed presidential candidates. Democratic board members applied inconsistent standards to their scrutiny of parties. Although the Constitution Party had the smallest margin of county-validated signatures, the board approved its petition in a unanimous 5-0 vote on July 9. It continued to challenge both the We the People Party and Justice for All Party based on complaints from Clear Choice Action, a group with deep ties to President Joe Biden and the national Democratic Party that threatened third parties back in March.
We have no way to know how many Justice for All signatures should not be counted because, according to written responses to committee questions, nobody on the State Board of Elections staff compared the 5,290 people who provided phone numbers with the 11,951 who did not.
The board’s decision on the Justice for All party also was a methodological mess. First, Board staff pulled a random sample of 250 people from this non-random and potentially skewed population for follow-up phone calls, according to board staff. Such a random sample can be unrepresentative, however, and staff did not take any steps to ensure its sample reflected the larger population of those who provided phone numbers, let alone the entire population of petition signers. Although the State Board of Elections has a statistician on staff, that person was not consulted about the validity of this survey methodology.
Biased sample in hand, staff made one call to each phone number on the list from State Board of Elections phone numbers during business hours between July 9 and 11. Only 49 of the 250 people responded. Again, staff did not consider how those 49 people differed from the 201 people who did not answer or the 5,040 not in the sample or the 11,951 who provided no phone number at all.
Despite this, board chairman Alan Hirsch and board member Jeff Carmon both said the survey of 49 people was key to their votes against the Justice for All Party.
Under oath, Hirsch told the House Oversight and Reform Committee that he believed based on the survey Justice for All did not have enough valid signatures to qualify. If the survey has no validity, neither should their votes.
The State Board of Elections should reverse its decision and provide ballot access justice for all North Carolinians.
This story was originally published July 31, 2024 at 12:00 PM with the headline "GOP lawmaker: The messy, inconsistent denial of Cornel West’s ballot bid | Opinion."