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zataomm  11mo ago (text post)   5751 thread views

Colorado Supreme Court Thread

Link to the decision

I don't know to what extent there are established precedents for when a topic is worthy of a mega-thread, but this decision seems like a big deal to me with a lot to discuss, so I'm putting this thread here as a place for discussion. If nobody agrees then I guess they just won't comment.

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I think part of the argument is that Colorado does indeed have a statutory restriction preventing ineligible candidates from being on the ballot. You don't need to go the full Baude/Paulsen to say that Colorado is permitted to do so. One could easily imagine a Thomas opinion arguing that states have the right to put whoever they want on their ballot for any damn reason they choose (as a separate question to the issue of whether Trump fails the criteria they set).

But Colorado does not have a statutory restriction preventing ineligible candidates from being listed on the ballot, and the Colorado Supreme Court did not find one. In fact, it held that :

To that extent, we agree with President Trump that the Secretary has no duty to determine, beyond what is apparent on the face of the required documents, whether a presidential candidate is qualified.

Hence the emphasis on "“wrongful act” that runs afoul of section 1-4-1203(2)(a) and undermines the purposes of the Election Code", and why there's so much emphasis on what's implied for 1203 purposes. But it doesn't matter; this is a state law question, and SCOTUS isn't going to punt because of it, and it wouldn't matter if they did (even for Colorado, for reasons I'm not discussing publicly).

It just makes Unikowsky's argument really weak at a philosophy-of-law level.

Huh. I admit I've kind of brushed over the questions related to Colorado law specifically, so I guess I'm a bit lost as to where the SOS authority to disqualify candidates comes from exactly. All I can say in my defence is the citations of Gorsuch in Hassan v Colorado made me assume that there was some well established existing authority for Colorado to do that.

There was a lot more authority and clear case-law on the matter before a bunch of the Colorado election code was revised in the last decade, although its bounds had a limitation. But that's... about as much detail as I'm comfortable giving publicly.

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