Cornel West backers sue North Carolina elections board to get on ballot

A group of North Carolina residents supporting independent presidential candidate Cornel West filed a lawsuit against the state on Monday after West’s political party was denied ballot access.

The North Carolina State Board of Elections had rejected the Justice for All Party’s bid for access in a meeting last week, with Democratic board members showing concerns that people who signed a ballot access petition may have been misled.

The suit claims the state board improperly rejected the party’s ballot application and raised concerns about partisan influence in the investigatory process. The application was rejected in a partisan 3-2 vote, with the board’s two Republicans in favor and three Democrats against.

“If this Board keeps rubberstamping thinly veiled so-called ‘parties,’ national operatives are going to continue to come in and try and manipulate our system,” Democratic board member Sioban O’Duffy Millen said during a June meeting about the party’s ballot access, according to the suit.

“To imply that JFA is a ‘faux party’ without having any basis for that assertion whatsoever is to slap thousands of Americans who disagree with the two-party system and who are looking for an alternative,” the suit responds.

In the same meeting last week, the state board accepted the petition for a party backing independent Robert F. Kennedy Jr, after applications for both parties were delayed last month.

Challenges to the parties backing West and Kennedy were led by Clear Choice Action, a Democratic-aligned activism group. The suit alleges the Democratic members of the board were overly reliant on misleading evidence provided by the group to reject its application.

The suit also claims the board verified about 17,000 signatures for the party, more than the about 13,800 required by law. It requests the state place the Justice for All Party on the ballot, overruling the board vote.

Former GOP House candidate Bo Hines, who lost a race to Rep. Wiley Nickel (D-N.C.) in 2022, also filed a suit Tuesday against the Democratic members of the board individually, claiming they failed to comply with state law and were politically biased.

“Democrats talk a lot about defending democracy, but these officials are hypocritically limiting the choices of North Carolinians and need to be held accountable,” Hines wrote on the social media platform X.