This point has come up in various permutations over the past few months, and as a furriner, I’m confused.
Over in the “Bernie Withdraws” thread, Left Hand of Dorkness says this:
But I thought, from previous threads on primaries, that access to the ballot for primary elections is determined by state laws? And if you as a candidate meet the state’s requirements to enter a primary, the party can’t keep you from entering? And, since those state laws are set by the 50 states, there are 50 different requirements for entering?
Or is it true, as Left Hand of Dorkness seems to suggest, the Democratic Party could have barred him from the primaries in all 50 states? (I’m reading his comment as meaning the party, not the Democratic members in the state legislatures who might be able to amend the laws?)
And, Left Hand of Dorkness, I’m not meaning to criticise you; this was just the most recent time I’ve seen a comment along this line, so I’m using it to illustrate my question.
I don’t think they could bar him from the ballots, but I’m assuming they could easily reject any delegate votes for him. Basically say that any delegates votes for someone who has not been a registered democrat for so many years would not be counted.
Party primary rules are determined by the party, even if the states and localities then administer the elections. AFAICT, a party could order that “only candidates who have gotten 5000 signatures from 38 year old people named Lindsay or Lindsey will appear on the ballot” and that’s how it would go.
But this news item from an earlier thread on primaries indicates that the federal courts have upheld the power of the states to determine the process the parties can use to nominate their candidates. The Circuit Court held that the Republican Party in Utah had to allow candidates to be nominated by a signature/primary process under state law, not by the party’s preferred option of a caucus/convention system:
Without trying to distinguish the 10th circuit case cited above, I’ll just point out, generally, that there is a distinction between qualifying to appear on a state’s ballot as a candidate and appearing on that ballot as a nominee of any particular party. It’s my understanding that - generally speaking - a party can decide for itself how to select its nominee, under whatever rules it may decide. This is separate and apart from whatever obligation exists to appear on a ballot.
I always thought that appearing on a ballot requires obtaining a certain number of signatures by a certain date. Party nominations can be done through primaries, but they can also be done in smoke filled rooms.
(And why seek a party’s nomination when you can make it onto the ballot with no party affiliation? For one, you get the support of party loyalists who will reflexively vote for you. But you also get the infrastructure to help you get on the ballots of each state, which can be onerous. You also, in theory, get access to the party’s coffers, although I believe that the DNC and RNC are perpetually broke).
The state party organization is affiliated with but it is not the national party. The decision was that the state party could not adopt a process to limit ballot access in a way not allowed by law. Those state parties even go so far as adopting state level platforms that can differ in some ways from the national party platform.
For Congress the election does not go outside the state. The national parties have informal and funding influence. They don’t get to set the rules. State law does that with state parties exercising discretion allowed within the law.
For presidential elections things get different. The primary, caucus, or state convention merely selects delegates to the national party convention. The national party can and does strip delegates in cases of rules violations. The national party also assigns the number of delegates to states. It is not something as simple as the state population and the concept of equal representation. Some of the adjustments to delegate counts are based on recent partisan election results. They function as rough proxies for the share of the state that typically votes for the party. Then there are the scheduling bonus delegates to try and shape the schedule. The party cannot say when a primary happens but the national parties do create incentives and disincentives to influence the state.
Two examples closer to the OP intent, might illuminate things. In 2008 Michigan and Florida scheduled their primary elections earlier than either party allowed in their rules. Both states had their delegates stripped by both parties. In 2012, a convicted and imprisoned felon finished second in WV with 41% of the vote in the WV Democratic primary against Obama. The national party then stripped him of all his delegates for rules violations. Apparently it was hard to hire good campaign staffers to make sure he followed the rules at the prison commissary.
But could the Democratic Party have said, «We don’t allow felons on the ballot in Democratic primaries?», and prevented the issue of getting so far as stripping him of delegates?
That’s my question. Could the Democratic Party have kept Bernie off the ballot? If they can’t keep a felon off the ballot, how do they keep a Senator off the ballot?
50 states, 50 sets of rules. What I am familiar with are the laws of New York state. The party nominees can be challenged in a primary. The party can’t stop them. The party can nominate their own candidate and anyone else can challenge them in a primary by getting a required number of signatures from party members on a petition. I believe many other states work that way. At their convention the Democrats can follow their own rules and nominate anyone they feel like, but once again, every state has their own election laws and allows anyone to run for president under their own party as do the states. You absolutely cannot keep qualified candidates off the ballot altogether.
It would have been a huge political problem for the party (unfortunately) to bar Bernie from their ballots, even after he signed a loyalty pledge and then blatantly defied it by registering with the FEC to run for reelection in Vermont as an independent.
But as a technical issue, if parties can’t kick people off their ballots, they may as well have no power at all. Look at what happened to the Reform Party in 2000: Pat Buchanan got his followers to elevate him to the nomination, getting control of their federal matching funds and then suspiciously doing almost nothing with them, while his sister Bay ran Bush’s campaign in Florida.
Imagine this dirty tricks scenario: Donald Trump sends Don Jr. to run in Democratic Party primaries, just as a troublemaker. He runs ads telling Republicans to answer pollsters’ calls and claim to be a Democrat who supports Don, so he can make the debates–where, if they actually gave him a podium, he would just trash the Dems and talk up the greatness of his dad. Do you really think the DNC would have to just helplessly let him up on the debate stage, even give him delegates if he got the MAGA brigade to come out and vote for him? No way.
Access to the ballot in a state-run presidential primary is determined by state laws (which may or may not take the opinion of some party entity into account), but the effect of the vote in a presidential primary is determined by the party internally. If the party wanted to have eligibility rules, and not allocate delegates to any candidate who was deemed ineligible, it could (AFAIK) do exactly that. For an extreme example, sometimes a state has a law mandating a state-run presidential primary, but the state party doesn’t actually want a state-run presidential primary, so the results are simply thrown in the garbage by the party and not used to determine anything at all; this type of primary is called a “beauty contest,” because it assigns nothing except bragging rights.
Presidential primaries are very different from primaries for lower offices. In a regular primary election, depending on state law, there may indeed be no party organization that has any ability to disqualify a candidate; “the party” in these instances is the primary voters and nobody else. Sometimes a party gets saddled with a very bad candidate, who would have been disqualified if the party brass could have done anything, and they just have to suck it up.
This is an odd objection to what I said. Yes, there are separate organizations such as the North Carolina Democratic Party and the Democratic National Committee. But it’s proper to refer to them collectively as the Democratic Party. AFAIK, there is no actual registered organization called “The Democratic Party” (and definitely not one that is what we’re talking about when we talk about The Democratic Party).
Had I said that the Democratic National Committee could’ve kept Sanders off the ballots, I might understand your objection. As it is, if I say I bit an apple, will you argue with me because it was my teeth that bit the apple?
On rereading, I think I misunderstood, my apologies. It’s not that state parties can change the rules, you’re saying; it’s that state governments can change the rules.
I’m not really sure about the details of that. Surely there are some limits on this; otherwise a hostile state legislature (like North Carolina’s) controlled by one party could impose absurd requirements on the other party. What’s to stop them?
But that’s what I’m asking - given that primaries are governed by state law, could the Dems have kicked Bernie off the ballot, even if he complied with all state laws that govern ballot access? If they can’t, it does look like they’ve got no control over the primaries themselves.
But that’s not my question. I’m not asking if the party can set its own rules for its debates, delegates and conventions. I’m asking if they could say “Bernie is not really a Democrat, so he’s not on the ballot.”
That’s my question, and I’m not criticising your comment - as a non-American, I find the intricacies of your system hard to follow, and I’m curious whether, as you seemed to suggest, the Democrats could have kept Bernie off the ballot. If that’s not what you were suggesting, my apologies. Still an interesting issue.
But wouldn’t that depend on the state law? the Circuit Court decision from Utah suggests, if I’ve understood it correctly, that the Utah parties cannot ignore the results of the primary, and that the winner of the primary gets on the ballot?
The party can’t keep a candidate off the primary ballot if the candidate qualifies under state law. The result of the primary has no standing with the national party when it comes to naming their candidate for the general election. They can ignore the results of the primaries if their own rules allow it.
I don’t know what you mean by “and that the winner of the primary gets on the ballot?”. The winner of a state primary gets delegates to the convention. The candidate with the most delegates gets the nomination according to the current rules, but those rules could be changed. You can win a primary, winning all of the primaries has no meaning outside of the party rules.
I suppose what people are saying is that the DNC could have decided that even if Bernie were on the ballot, they would announce in advance that votes for him would be disregarded. But I’m actually skeptical that even that much is true. I believe they could have kept them off the ballot altogether if they so chose, but I am admittedly not an election attorney.
What I would ask is: why then are there not hundreds of names on that ballot? Who decides, if not the party, who is a legitimate candidate?
I don’t know why it is this way exactly, but my guess is the scarcity of national election laws leaves the national parties to do whatever they want. In the end they can’t keep a candidate off the ballot, only keep them from using the party name. The states are where the primary action is, and without a decent set of regulations they and/or the parties would be awash in lawsuits during every election. In addition, without state sanction the major parties lose official status and their undue influence on the electoral process.
There can be hundreds of names on a ballot, the state decides that. Anyone can run for office in any state in a general election. The primaries are only about who gets to represent a particular party on the ballot.
ETA: And if a party tries to keep a candidate off the ballot as their representative in some fishy manner they will get sued, one state at a time, and each state could decide to over-rule them. The parties cannot constrain the states.