by As Washington state’s top elections official, Steve Hobbs says he is concerned about the threat former President Donald J. Trump poses to democracy and fears the prospect of his return to power. But he also worries that recent decisions in Maine and Colorado to exclude Trump from presidential primaries there could backfire and further erode Americans’ weakened faith in U.S. elections.
“Taking it off the ballot, at first glance, would seem very undemocratic,” said Hobbs, a Democrat who is in his first term as secretary of state. He then added a critical warning: “But so is trying to overthrow your country.”
Hobbs’s doubts reflect deep divisions and unease among elected officials, democracy experts and voters about how to handle Trump’s campaign to regain the presidency four years after he did everything he could to try to overturn the 2020 election. While While some, like Hobbs, think it’s best for voters to resolve the issue, others say Trump’s efforts require accountability and should be legally disqualifying.
Challenges to Trump’s candidacy have been filed in at least 32 states, though many of those challenges have gained little or no traction, and some have languished in court dockets for months.
The decisions being made now come amid a collapse of faith in the American electoral system, said Nate Persily, a professor at Stanford Law School who specializes in electoral law and democracy.
“Here we are walking through new constitutional snow trying to figure out how to address these unprecedented developments,” he said.
Professor Persily and other legal experts said they expected the US Supreme Court to eventually overturn decisions in Colorado and Maine to keep Trump on the ballot, perhaps dodging the question of whether Trump participated in an insurrection. Persily is hopeful that whatever ruling the court issues will bring clarity, and soon.
“This is not a political and electoral system that can deal with ambiguity right now,” he said.
Trump and his supporters have called the disqualifications in Maine and Colorado partisan ploys that deprived voters of their right to choose candidates. They accused Democrats of hypocrisy for trying to exclude Trump from the ticket after campaigning in the last two elections as defenders of democracy.
After the Colorado Supreme Court ruled that Trump should be removed from the state’s primary ballot, Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, said in a statement: “Apparently, democracy is when judges tell people that They cannot vote for the candidate.” leading in the polls? This is shameful. “The Supreme Court must take up the case and put an end to this attack on American voters.”
Chris Christie, former governor of New Jersey and Trump’s most ardent critic in the Republican primaries, warned that Maine’s decision would make Trump a “martyr.”
But other prominent Trump critics, many of them anti-Trump Republicans, said the threat he posed to democracy and his actions around the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol now required extraordinary intervention, whatever the electoral consequences.
The challenges are based on a Reconstruction-era provision of the 14th Amendment that prohibits anyone who has participated in a rebellion or insurrection from holding federal or state office.
J. Michael Luttig, a retired conservative federal appeals court judge, praised the Colorado and Maine decisions as “irrefutable” interpretations of the Constitution. Officials in Maine and Colorado who disqualified Trump from the ballot wrote that his decisions stemmed from following the language of the Constitution.
But on a recent sunny Friday afternoon in the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, Deena Drewis, 37, an editor, and Aaron Baggaley, 43, a contractor, both of whom have consistently voted Democratic, expressed uncomfortable ambivalence about such a step. extraordinary.
“I’m really conflicted,” Baggaley said. “It is difficult to imagine that he did not become fully involved in the insurrection. Everything points to it. But the other half of the country is in a position where they feel it should be up to the electorate.”
Officials in Democratic-controlled California have shown little interest in following Colorado and Maine. California Democratic Secretary of State Shirley Weber announced Thursday that Trump would remain on the ballot, and Gov. Gavin Newsom dismissed calls from other Democrats to impeach him. “We defeated the candidates at the polls,” Newsom said in a statement. “Everything else is a political distraction.”
In interviews, some voters and experts said it was premature to disqualify Trump because he had not been criminally convicted of insurrection. They worried that officials in red states could use the tactic to remove Democratic candidates from future elections, or that disqualifications could further poison the country’s political divisions while giving Trump a new grievance to protest. .
“Attempts to disqualify demagogues who have deep popular support often backfire,” said Yascha Mounk, a professor and political scientist at Johns Hopkins University who has written about threats to democracies. “The only way to neutralize the danger posed by authoritarian populists like Donald Trump is to defeat them at the polls, as decisively as possible and as often as necessary.”
Decisions by the Colorado supreme court and the Maine secretary of state barring Trump from participating in the state primary election are on hold for now and are likely to be decided by the U.S. Supreme Court.
While most challenges to Trump’s candidacy have taken place in federal or state courts, Maine’s constitution required voters seeking to disqualify Trump to petition the secretary of state, targeting a politically volatile decision with enormous consequences. hands of Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, a Democrat.
Their counterparts in other states said they had spent months discussing whether they might face a similar decision, and that they had been talking to other election officials and their legal teams about the thicket of state laws that govern each state’s elections.
In Washington state, Hobbs said he did not believe he had the power as secretary of state to unilaterally remove Trump from the ballot. He was relieved, he said, because he didn’t believe one person should have the power to decide who qualifies to run for president.
The stakes for the nation were enormous, Hobbs said, because of the damage Trump had already done to the nation’s faith in the election.
“It’s hard to put the genie back in the bottle,” he said. “This will be a long-term effort to try to regain trust among those who have lost it.”
Jena Griswold, Colorado’s Democratic secretary of state, said in an interview this week that she supported the decisions by Bellows and the Colorado Supreme Court to remove Trump from the ballot.
Poll workers and secretaries of state have increasingly become targets of conspiracy theorists and violent threats since Trump’s refusal to accept his 2020 defeat; Griswold said he had received 64 death threats since six Republican and unaffiliated voters in Colorado filed the lawsuit seeking to remove Trump from the ballot.
“All of us swear an oath to uphold our state constitution and the Constitution of the United States,” Ms. Griswold said. “Making these decisions requires bravery and courage.”
His office Announced this week that, because Trump’s case had been appealed, his name would be included on Colorado’s primary ballots unless the U.S. Supreme Court said otherwise or refused to take up his case.
In Arizona, putting Trump on the ballot was an easier decision, said Adrian Fontes, the Democratic secretary of state. He said state law required him to include any candidate who had been certified in two other states.
He called the storm of legal rulings, dissents and conflicting opinions swirling around Trump’s place on the ballot a “slow civics lesson” that demonstrated the country’s democratic resilience.
“I kind of celebrate the idea that it’s complicated,” he said. “We’re having this conversation because that’s what democracy is all about.”
mitch smith and Miguel wines contributed reports.
