Cornel West, who is running for US president as a third party candidate in 2024, will deliver the keynote speech at the #BLM Turns 10 People’s Justice Festival in the Leimert Park neighborhood of Los Angeles on July 15, 2023.
A group of North Carolina residents supporting independent presidential candidate Cornel West filed a lawsuit against the state on Monday, alleging that West’s party was denied voting rights.
The North Carolina State Board of Elections rejected the Justice for All Party’s voting access application at a meeting last week, but Democratic commissioners expressed concern that people who signed the voting access petition may have been misled.
The lawsuit alleges that the state committee improperly rejected the party’s ballot application, raising concerns about partisan influence in the investigation process. The application was rejected on a partisan 3-2 vote, with two Republicans on the committee in favor and three Democrats opposed.
“If this committee continues to approve flimsy so-called ‘political parties,’ national operatives will continue to come in and attempt to game our system,” Democratic Party director Siobhan O’Duffy Millen said at a June meeting about the party’s voting access, according to the lawsuit.
“To suggest without any basis that the JFA is a ‘sham political party’ is an insult to the thousands of Americans who oppose the two-party system and seek an alternative,” the lawsuit argues.
At the same meeting last week, the state committee accepted a party petition in support of independent Robert F. Kennedy Jr., after both parties filed late last month.
The lawsuit against West and Kennedy’s party was led by the Democratic activist group Clear Choice Action, which claims that Democratic members of the committee placed undue reliance on misleading evidence submitted by the group in rejecting the applications.
The lawsuit also alleges that the committee verified about 17,000 signatures for the party, more than the roughly 13,800 required by law. The lawsuit asks the state to overturn the committee’s vote and place the Justice for All party on the ballot.
Beau Hines, a former Republican House candidate who lost to Rep. Wiley Nickel of R-Columbia in the 2022 election, also filed a lawsuit Tuesday against individual Democratic members of the committee, alleging they failed to comply with state law and are politically biased.
“Democrats often say they protect our democracy, but these officials are hypocritically limiting choices for North Carolinians and need to be held accountable,” Hines wrote on the social media platform X.
