North Carolina ballot access ended for the Justice for All Party when presidential candidate Cornel West failed to secure at least 2% of the vote in the 2024 election. Yet lawyers who helped JFA secure ballot access last year want to continue their legal fight against new state election rules.
JFA’s lawyers filed court documents Friday seeking to amend the federal lawsuit that helped the party win a court injunction that guaranteed a spot on North Carolina’s 2024 ballot.
The State Board of Elections filed a document on July 21 arguing that JFA’s legal claims are moot now that the party has lost its spot on the state ballot.
JFA’s latest court filings argue that the party now challenges “extensive new rules applicable to political parties that seek to qualify for the ballot” that took effect on July 1, more than seven months after the election.
“JFA seeks leave to amend its pleading for the limited purpose of asserting claims that could not have been included in its original Complaint because they arose after JFA filed it,” wrote the party’s lawyers. JFA’s legal team includes Oliver Hall of the Washington, DC-based Center for Competitive Democracy.
The new rules address “how a party demonstrates compliance with the purpose and intent requirement” in state law, how the state elections board “determines the sufficiency of a party’s nomination petitions,” and “how petition signers may obtain removal of their signatures from a party’s nomination petition.”
“JFA seeks leave to amend its Complaint to assert claims challenging the constitutionality of these new rules and the purpose and intent requirement,” the party’s lawyers wrote.
The election rules “violate the First Amendment facially and as applied because they vest the Board with unbounded discretion to enforce a content-based prior restraint on new political parties like JFA, and because they impermissibly infringe such parties’ ‘core political speech.’” according to the court filing.
JFA’s lawyers specifically target a state law, NC Gen. Stat. § 163-96(b), and multiple state elections board rules.
“Section 163-96(b) requires that petition circulators for a new party ‘shall inform the signers of the general purpose and intent of the new party,’ and Rule 22.0305 requires that county boards of election ‘shall not’ validate the new party’s signatures until the new party submits documentation to the Board demonstrating that its petition circulators complied with the purpose and intent requirement,” according to the court filing.
“That is a prior restraint. It is content-based because Rule 22.0305 and Rule 22.0306 authorize the Board to deny certification to a new party if the Board concludes the new party’s speech fails to satisfy the purpose and intent requirement,” JFA’s lawyers wrote. “And the rules vest the Board with unbounded discretion because they provide no objective, definite standards to guide its inquiry into the adequacy or sufficiency of the new party’s speech. Such a scheme is facially unconstitutional … and unduly burdens JFA’s core political speech.”
“North Carolina’s scheme is also unconstitutional as applied to JFA,” the party’s lawyers argued. In the 2024 dispute, “the facts alleged establish that the Board denied certification to JFA largely because it concluded JFA’s speech did not comply with § 163-96(b)’s purpose and intent requirement.”
The complaint noted then board chairman Alan Hirsch’s statement in a 2024 meeting that 50% of JFA petition signatures were “’highly questionable’ because he believed petition circulators did not accurately communicate JFA’s genuine purpose and intent to the petition signers.” Board member Siobhan Millen “suggested that JFA was a ‘faux party’ created for a purpose she erroneously believed to be improper – ‘allowing unaffiliated candidates to follow the more lenient new party rules.’”
“The First Amendment, however, does not permit elections officials to deny certification to a new political party because they disagree with the speech its petition circulators use to communicate with potential supporters or because they believe the purpose for which it was formed is somehow improper,” JFA’s lawyers wrote.
The amended complaint argues that rule 22.0306 “vests the Board with unbounded discretion to deny certification to a new party even if the party timely complies with all applicable statutory requirements.”
Challenged rule 22.0204 “severely burdens a new party like JFA’s First and Fourteenth Amendment rights and is not narrowly tailored to further a compelling state interest,” JFA’s lawyers argued.
“Rule 22.0204 establishes a procedure that authorizes signers of a new party’s petitions to obtain removal of their signatures even after the deadline for signature collection has passed,” the court filing explained. “Such a procedure severely burdens any new party that submits nomination petitions with a sufficient number of validated signatures only to find, after the signature collection period has expired, that enough petition signers obtain removal of their signatures to bring the new party below the signature requirement.”
“[T]his threat is real,” JFA’s lawyers argued. “[A]mple evidence demonstrates that adversaries of new parties have engaged in concerted efforts to harass and coerce petition signers into requesting removal of their signatures even before the procedure was authorized under Rule 22.0204.”
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