US: Democratic Party Bid to Kick Socialists Off Ballot Ahead of Nov Polls

In key states for the 2024 US Presidential elections, the Democratic Party machine is carrying out attacks on the democratic process, attempting to limit ballot access for socialist candidate Claudia De La Cruz. In the critical states of Georgia and Pennsylvania, which historically are often toss-ups between the presidential candidates of the two major establishment parties, Democrats are attempting to secure their victory by pushing left-wing progressives off the ballot. 

De la Cruz’s campaign won a major victory on August 29, however, when Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger ruled that there was no basis for the campaign to be excluded from the ballot. The campaign is celebrating the win but claims that this is not the end of the fight. “Now, we need to defend this legal victory from any appeal filed by the Democratic Party’s well-funded army of lawyers who are waging war on third parties nationwide. We expect legal fees related to an appeal of this ruling to total around $25,000,” the campaign stated. 

“The Democratic Party is deploying an army of lawyers and millions of dollars to try to kick the Vote Socialist campaign off the ballot in key states where tens of thousands of people have already signed the required petitions for ballot access,” stated De La Cruz’s campaign. De La Cruz is running as a socialist on the ticket of the Party for Socialism and Liberation, alongside running mate Karina Garcia.

It is significant that these attacks are taking place in areas dubbed “swing states”. In 2020, Biden won Pennsylvania  by a narrow margin, reversing Trump’s victory in the state in the 2016 election. In 2020, Biden narrowly won Georgia by little over 10,000 votes. Biden’s win in the state resulted in years of legal disputes and attempts to delegitimize the elections by Trump and his right-wing supporters.

In Ohio, Claudia’s campaign is also under attack by Republican Party officials, indicating the willingness of both parties to go after third party candidates. Republican Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose announced this week that Claudia would not be on the ballot due to paperwork technicalities in the submission process. LaRose also recently conducted a purge of over 150,000 voters from the roles, forcing residents to go out of their way to check if they are even still eligible to vote. 

Fight for democracy

The ongoing legal challenges to De la Cruz’s socialist campaign are taking place in states where dozens of volunteers worked for months to collect signatures. Due to a patchwork of laws spanning across the country, it is an automatic process for candidates from both major parties to get ballot status. 

However, for third parties, it is a lengthy and arduous process, with some states requiring tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of signatures gathered from potential voters over a limited period of time, just for candidates to be able to appear on a given state’s ballot. The Vote Socialist campaign carried out this lengthy and difficult process by teams of volunteers in several states, including Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Ohio.

As the recent legal challenges show, the struggle is not over once the thousands of petitions are submitted to secure ballot access, and that the dominant parties will try tooth and nail to tear those victories down. 

Claudia De la Cruz remarked, “This is an assault on democracy. Both parties will stop at nothing to eliminate independent third party options. The idea that people could cast a vote for a campaign that stands against the two-party system dominated by Wall Street and the war machine terrifies the political establishment. That’s why their lawyers and politicians are pushing to kick us off the ballot.”

De la Cruz emphasized that the legal challenges to ballot access are part of the broader, historic strategy of the US ruling class to pursue different policies of voter disenfranchisement to limit the participation of oppressed minorities in the democratic process. “It is no coincidence that the state officials most aggressively trying to disqualify our campaign are the same ones waging racist efforts to disenfranchise Black, Latino and impoverished voters in huge numbers. Georgia was once the heart of Jim Crow voter disenfranchisement, and right wing officials are still at it – with the help of Democratic Party lawyers,” De la Cruz stated.

This is not the first time the Democratic Party machine has chosen to spend its efforts targeting leftist candidates rather than the right-wing that they claim to oppose. In 2022, Jacobin published a piece about the shocking attempts by Democrats to block the Green Party from the North Carolina ballot, including going to someone’s house to persuade him to remove his name from a ballot access petition for the Greens. 

In Pennsylvania, last week, a state court ruled in favor of the Democratic Party-backed lawyers seeking to kick the campaign off the ballot. De la Cruz’s campaign is appealing the decision in the state. 

Pennsylvania chairperson for the De la Cruz campaign Stephanie Pavlick said, “We are appealing this unjust decision. On the basis of bureaucratic technicalities and frivolous paperwork issues, the Democrats want to deny Pennsylvanians the right to vote for Claudia and Karina in November. They know they can’t defend their pro-corporate, pro-war record, so they want to do everything they can to make sure that the only other candidate on the ballot is Donald Trump. We will keep fighting back against this campaign against democracy!”

Uphill battle for third parties

The Vote Socialist campaign notably will not appear on the ballot in all states in the US. The hurdles that third party candidates must cross to have a spot on the ballot varies from state to state, and some states make these hurdles insurmountable for a campaign run by working class, unpaid volunteers. 

This includes states such as New York, for example, which changed the rules for ballot access in 2022, increasing the required signatures for ballot access for independent candidates from 15,000 to a whopping 45,000, to be collected in the span of six weeks. Even for candidates who might be running on a third party ticket, the barrier of entry in New York for a “group” to qualify as a “party”, thus gaining automatic ballot access, has become practically insurmountable. There is no procedure for a group to transform itself into a party in advance of an election, a process that exists in 39 states. For a group to qualify as a party, it must poll 2% in elections for state Governor or US President, which in 2020 was 172,337 votes. This makes ballot access in New York State essentially impossible for candidates who don’t have an excess of money to spend on petitioning drives.