They are threatening to file all kinds of lawsuits to contest dropping Biden from the ballot. Of course, Biden isn’t on the ballot because there is no ballot yet. And what are they talking about? People drop out of races all the time!
Election expert Rich Hasen explains why they are full of it legally:
With news of President Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the presidential race, some Republicans are claiming he cannot be removed from the presidential ballot in November and that in any case it is undemocratic to do so. The first claim is legally unsupported and the second one is ludicrous. I fully expect the Democrats’ legitimate nominees for president and vice president to be listed on the ballot in November.
Let’s start with the legal issue. The premise of the argument that Biden cannot be “removed” from the ballot is that he’s already “on” the ballot for president. He’s not.
When it comes to which candidates are listed on the general election ballot for president, states set their own rules. Typically, the rules provide that after each recognized political party has had its convention or otherwise gone through its process of choosing a nominee, the party must transmit that information to the states by a certain date so that ballots and other election materials can be prepared.The video player is currently playing an ad.00:11Skip Ad
Joe Biden has not yet been nominated to be president even though he had racked up enough delegates at the upcoming Democratic National Convention to have had an easy time getting the official nomination had he stayed in the race. He was only the presumptive nominee, not the official nominee—nobody is, until there’s a vote. So Biden need not be replaced, because he was never the official candidate.
To the extent that there’s even the hint of a legal issue, it’s not over whether it’s Biden or someone else who is the Democrats’ nominee, but about the timing of choosing the official nominee. The key is that nomination happens in time to get the candidate on the ballot in each state. For instance, Ohio originally had a ballot deadline that was before the Democratic National Convention, leading to a risk that no Democratic nominee would be listed on the ballot in that state. Ohio changed its law to a later deadline to accommodate the late convention. As I explained at Election Law Blog, there’s a hypertechnical argument that Ohio could still contend that a nomination coming from Democrats after their convention would be too late. This was the purported reason Democrats were going to do an early virtual roll-call vote to choose Biden. (I think the real reason for an early roll call was for partisans to lock Biden in, not to avoid litigation.)
Any litigation to keep Biden off the Ohio ballot would be extremely unlikely to succeed because Ohio has committed to the later date and transmitted that later date to local election officials. Everyone is relying on that and so Ohio would not be able to just change its mind, any more than any other Republican state could try to retroactively change the ballot access rules. Further, courts generally hold that states can’t make it too hard for serious candidates to get a place on the ballot, and that rule would easily apply to the eventual Democratic Party nominee.
In a handful of other states, including Washington state, there is a different ballot access timing issue that could trigger a lawsuit. (The issue is even more technical and has to do with an election administrator’s power to extend a legislative deadline in a presidential election.) For this reason, Democrats would be smart to still do that virtual roll call by Aug. 7 if they’ve coalesced around Vice President Kamala Harris or another candidate. That would avoid even the small risk of a serious lawsuit.
He goes on to discuss at length why their claims of this being undemocratic are so incredibly stupid. I honestly don’t think we even need to discuss it. Coming from these fascist insurrectionists it’s not even worth considering.
They will try, of course because they are shameless assholes. The whole point is to try and muddy the waters with yet another “I know you are but what am I?” piece of nonsense. It won’t work but their delusional cult followers won’t know the difference.