Aug. 21 (UPI) — Maine’s Secretary of State ruled Tuesday that leftist presidential candidate Cornel West will be on the state’s November ballot. West had been challenged by voters alleging fraudulent signatures were submitted.
Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows wrote in her decision as she ruled for West, “I conclude that some signatures were gathered fraudulently, and I reject the petition forms that contain those signatures. However, the bad actions of one should not impugn the valid First Amendment rights of the many.”
In addition to some fraudulent signatures turned in by a circulator, Bellows found some municipal registrar errors in the nominating petitions.
Three voters in Maine — Nathan Berger of Portland, Anne Gass of Gray and Sandra Marquis of Lewiston — objected to West being on the ballot. They alleged too many signatures were submitted — 5,983 when the state legal limit is 5,000.
According to witnesses who testified at a Maine Secretary of State hearing, they signed a petition they thought was to stop politicians form trading stocks when, in fact, they were nominating petitions for West.
The voters said they discovered they had signed a West petition when contacted by the law firm Gass and Marquis. The law firm presented evidence that circulator Patrick Powers had allegedly used deceptive tactics to get the signatures.
Bellows rejected the attempt to bar West from the ballot for the fraud, finding that “the evidence indicated that campaign organizers had little involvement in the circulation of their petitions in Maine.”
“While other states across the country may direct election officials to exclude voters from duly participating in our elections processes on the basis of scrivener’s quibbles, Maine does not,” Bellows said in her decision. “Our election laws are grounded in encouraging full and fair voter participation, and the registrars acted appropriately in certifying signatures for voters that they could verify regardless of whether a voter signed with a nickname or dated the petition with the day and month only.”
On Aug. 13 a North Carolina judge ruled West must be on the ballot there, overruling a state decision to bar him.
West is a Harvard professor and activist running a long-shot independent campaign.
His campaign has struggled to get ballot access and so far is on only a handful of state ballots as efforts to secure ballot access continue.