Lawsuits Over Voting
New York has been the hotbed for coronavirus in this country. Like other states, there was concern there about how to hold the state’s presidential primary, scheduled for June 23rd. Some states held them as normal with social distancing, others went to a mail-in ballot. New York did something completely different…they cancelled the thing altogether.
States don’t have to have primaries in order to determine convention delegates, of course; Iowa is the prime example of that. The state budget gave Democrat commissioners on the Board of Elections the power to remove from the ballot the names of candidates who ended their campaigns, in essence so folks don’t waste their votes. After Bernie Sanders suspended his candidacy, of all those on the ballot, Joe Biden was the last one standing…so they cancelled the primary since there was no race to be run. You might recall the Sanders folks howled about that, because Bernie still wanted to do well and have delegates to leverage at the convention, regarding the party platform and other things.
But another former candidate, Andrew Yang, took it a step further. He sued the state, saying it suppresses due process and voter turnout if people don’t have a chance to vote for the nation’s highest office. The state countered by noting that you have to have legal standing in order to file any lawsuit, and a person who dropped out of the presidential race suffers no greater harm than any of us who never ran, and therefore has no standing to sue. Yang’s attorneys note that since so many who were on the ballot were non-Caucasians, he may add a discrimination claim to the lawsuit, since Yang is the first major Asian-American candidate.
The state says for safety, and cost savings, there’s no need for a primary. Of course, conspiracy theorists suggest that this would be a way for New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo to swoop in and grab the nomination, using New York’s delegates as a foundation since they weren’t officially committed to Biden or anyone else.
Never mind presumptive candidates. It’s still a long way to the party’s convention…if they even have one. More on that tomorrow.
