My prediction – Kobach will find a shill, someone who claims to be a Democrat and will walk into Dem Party headquarters and volunteer to run and get on the ballot. Then the Dems won’t be able to claim they couldn’t find a Democrat who was willing to run.
Or maybe the shill will entirely bypass the party – just show up to the Secretary’s office, claim to be a volunteer and sign some paper to get on the ballot.
If it comes to that, the Democrats should find someone named Pat Roberts.
It may be worth noting that Kobach is up for reelection this year too. I’m not sure how he’s polling at the moment, but between the voter ID laws he’s put into place and all the time he’s spent in other states helping them with their anti immigration legislation (which he claims he’s doing on his own time) I wouldn’t be sorry to see him go.
This guy? He claims to be a Democratic voter who says he’s being disenfranchised by not having a Democrat to vote for, but he has family ties to Brownback’s reelection campaign.
http://ksn.com/2014/09/18/democrat-petitions-to-be-added-to-kansas-senate-race-after-lawsuit/
That guy is a shill who is (allegedly) trying to get someone else on the ballot - that is, any Democrat. Jim is saying Kobach will find a patsy to be on the ballot.
Couldn’t the Democrats just name Orman as their candidate?
He wouldn’t accept and he can’t run as both the independent candidate and the democratic candidate.
Blogs are saying that Kobach caved, will send out mail-in ballots with no Dem candidate on them.
A bylined news article from the LA Times:
OK, I guess, but is he trying to say that the current ballots won’t count if replacement ballots are sent out? After the deadline?
But even better:
I have no particular desire to inform Kansans on who they should vote for for Senate, but damn!, they need a new Secretary of State!
I know–I was attempting to make a funny, and it clearly didn’t work as well as I’d hoped!
The Kansas Supreme Court has referred the case to a district court (from here):
That’s an interesting ruling. The justice who shipped it out said the KS Supreme Court “lacked evidence” to determine whether state law allowed the AG to force the Democrats to add another candidate. Evidence? There’s a claim about what the law means, there’s the text of the law, and the court is supposed to decide if the interpretation is correct or not. What other evidence do they need?
Also, the article in in error in at least one point. The delayed lawsuit won’t make it impossible for the Democrats to put up a candidate. What it will do is make it impossible for the AG to force the Democrats to put up a candidate.
They need a record: witness testimony, documentary evidence, and so on. Appellate courts don’t hear testimony or make pretrial evidentiary rulings themselves, and generally aren’t well-equipped to do so.
If the parties agreed, they could dispense with the requirement for a formal record and just answer the question of law. But if the parties don’t agree due process won’t allow that - and the KSDP isn’t going to agree because there’s nothing in it for them.
Why didn’t they need all that for the first decision?
That’s a little complicated, but the basic answer is that the petition was filed on an emergency basis and the defendant was a state agency, which is not entitled to due process (or at least to the same degree as a private litigant.)
Just wanted to add a few followup thought to this. Their first decision was that the AG could not refuse to allow the Dem candidate from the ballot. This was unanimous, or maybe more accurately, by consensus. One would think there would be MORE evidence needed to decide that case – prior withdrawal letters submitted candidates, prior refusals to accept such a letter, prior case histories of any litigation of the issue, etc.
It’s arguable that this second issue might need the same kind of research, but why accept and decide the first and refuse the second? And particularly when the court must have understood that the delay meant a defacto loss for the AG.
It must have been the Candidate or the Democratic party who filed the first case, to force the AG to remove the name after he proclaimed that he wouldn’t.
Do we know how this second case came about? As I understand it, after the first ruling the AG issued an order that the Party put up another name. So I would guess that the Democrats would also be the ones filing the second case. But it’s possible the Dems just made some public snorting sounds about not doing it, and the AG then filed papers asking the court to rule on his order as an aid to enforcing it.
In the first case, I’m sure the Dems wouldn’t have filed it with a claim of “emergency” since they were in no hurry. Does the AG have the power to request some kind of “emergency” rapid ruling, no matter which side filed?
I don’t know what you mean by “prior case histories”, but case law isn’t considered evidence. It’s considered argument, and it’s always admissible without notice to the other party (just like, say, the text of a statute).
Again, both parties in the new law suit are private litigants, which means they get to present evidence and the like no matter what. The only evidence the court considered in the first lawsuit were a few affidavits, Taylor’s letter and those of prior candidates.
ETA: In the second case the plaintiff is a “registered Democrat” (the father of a Brownback campaign staffer) who wants to force the Dems to nominate someone. Kobach isn’t officially involved. Taylor did file the first lawsuit, and he was certainly in a hurry; if it hadn’t been decided quickly, his name would have been on the ballot. Kobach is the Secretary of State, incidentally, not the Attorney General.
Ok, I thought the two parties were essentially the same in both cases, but I now see they aren’t. Thanks for the clarification.
Fascinating. Yet again, I am baffled by the fact that in the US, the person in charge of the electoral process is a partisan politician, rather than a non-partisan, neutral official.