As Washington state’s top elections official, Steve Hobbs says he is troubled by the threat former President Donald J. Trump poses to democracy and fears the prospect of his return to power. But he also fears that recent decisions in Maine and Colorado barring Mr. Trump from participating in presidential primaries could backfire, further eroding Americans’ confidence in U.S. elections.
“Taking him off the ballot would seem, on its face, very undemocratic,” said Mr. Hobbs, a Democrat in his first term as secretary of state. Then he added a critical caveat: “But so is trying to overthrow your country. »
Mr. Hobbs’s misgivings reflect deep divisions and unease among elected officials, democracy experts and voters over how to handle Mr. Trump’s campaign to win back the presidency, four years after he first made an effort extraordinary measures to try to overturn the 2020 election. While some, like Mr. Hobbs, think it is best for voters to settle the matter, others say Mr. Trump’s efforts require accountability and should be legally disqualifying.
Challenges to Mr. Trump’s candidacy have been filed in at least 32 states, although many of those challenges have had little or no success, and some have languished on court dockets for months.
The decisions being made now come against a backdrop of collapsing confidence in the U.S. electoral system, said Nate Persily, a professor at Stanford Law School who specializes in election law and democracy.
“We’re walking here in new constitutional snow trying to figure out how to deal with these unprecedented developments,” he said.
Professor Persily and other legal experts said they expected the U.S. Supreme Court to ultimately overturn decisions in Colorado and Maine to keep Mr. Trump on the ballot, potentially evading -be the question of whether Mr. Trump engaged in an insurrection. Mr Persily hopes that whatever decision the court makes, it will provide clarity – and soon.
“It’s not a political and electoral system that can handle ambiguity right now,” he said.
Mr. Trump and his supporters have called the disqualifications in Maine and Colorado partisan ploys that deprive voters of their right to choose candidates. They accused Democrats of hypocrisy for trying to exclude Mr. Trump from the ballot after campaigning in the last two elections as champions of democracy.
After the Colorado Supreme Court ruled that Mr. Trump should be barred from the state’s primary ballot, Senator JD Vance, Republican of Ohio, said in a statement: “Apparently, democracy is when judges tell people they are not allowed to vote for the candidate. leading in the polls? It is shameful. The Supreme Court must take up the matter and end this attack on American voters. »
Chris Christie, the former governor of New Jersey and Mr. Trump’s most vocal critic during the Republican primary, warned that Maine’s decision would make Mr. Trump a “martyr.”
But other prominent critics of Mr. Trump — many of whom are anti-Trump Republicans — said the threat he posed to democracy and his actions around the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol now required intervention. extraordinary, whatever the electoral consequences.
The challenges are based on a provision of the Reconstruction-era 14th Amendment that prohibits anyone engaged in rebellion or insurrection from holding federal or state office.
J. Michael Luttig, a retired conservative federal appeals court judge, hailed the decisions in Colorado and Maine as “unassailable” interpretations of the Constitution. The Maine and Colorado officials who disqualified Mr. Trump from the ballot wrote that their decisions stemmed from following the language of the Constitution.
But recently, on a sunny Friday afternoon in the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, Deena Drewis, 37, an editor, and Aaron Baggaley, 43, an entrepreneur, both of whom have regularly voted for Democrats, expressed a nauseating ambivalence towards such a project. extraordinary step.
“I’m really conflicted,” Mr. Baggaley said. “It is difficult to imagine that he was not fully committed to the insurrection. Everything leads us to believe it. But the other half of the country is in a situation where they think it should be up to the electorate.”
Officials in Democratic-controlled California have shown little inclination to follow Colorado and Maine. California’s Democratic Secretary of State, Shirley Weber, announced Thursday that Mr. Trump would remain on the ballot, and Governor Gavin Newsom rejected calls from other Democrats to impeach him. “We are defeating candidates at the ballot box,” Mr. Newsom said in a statement. statement. “Everything else is just a political distraction.”
In interviews, some voters and experts said it was premature to disqualify Mr. Trump because he had not been convicted of insurrection. They feared that red-state officials would use the tactic to eliminate Democratic candidates from upcoming ballots, or that the disqualifications could further poison the country’s political divisions while giving Mr. Trump a new grievance to rail against. oppose.
“Attempts to disqualify demagogues with broad popular support often backfire,” said Yascha Mounk, a professor and political scientist at Johns Hopkins University who has written about threats to democracies. “The only way to neutralize the danger posed by authoritarian populists like Donald Trump is to defeat them at the ballot box, as decisively as possible and as often as necessary.”
Decisions by Colorado’s highest court and Maine’s secretary of state barring Mr. Trump from participating in the state’s primary election are on hold for now and are expected to be decided by the U.S. Supreme Court.
While most challenges to Mr. Trump’s candidacy have been brought in federal or state courts, Maine’s constitution required voters seeking to disqualify Mr. Trump to file a petition with the secretary of state, effectively placing the politically volatile and extremely consequential decision in the hands of the courts. hands of Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, a Democrat.
His counterparts in other states said they had spent months discussing the possibility of facing a similar ruling and had spoken with other election officials and their legal teams about the thickness of the laws of the States governing the elections of each State.
In Washington state, Mr. Hobbs said he did not believe he had the authority as secretary of state to unilaterally remove Mr. Trump from the ballot. He was relieved, he said, because he didn’t think a single person should have the power to decide who is qualified to run for president.
The stakes for the nation were enormous, Mr. Hobbs said, because of the damage Mr. Trump had already done to confidence in national elections.
“It’s hard to put the genie back in the bottle,” he said. “This will be a long-term effort to try to regain the trust of those who have lost it. »
Jena Griswold, Colorado’s Democratic secretary of state, said in an interview this week that she supported the decisions by Ms. Bellows and the Colorado Supreme Court to remove Mr. Trump from the ballot.
Election workers and secretaries of state have increasingly been targets of conspiracy theorists and violent threats since Mr. Trump’s refusal to accept his 2020 defeat; Ms. Griswold said she has received 64 death threats since the lawsuit seeking to remove Mr. Trump from the ballot was brought by six Republican and unaffiliated voters in Colorado.
“We all swear to uphold our state constitution and the U.S. Constitution,” Ms. Griswold said. “Making these decisions takes courage and fortitude. »
His office announcement this week, because Mr. Trump’s case had been appealed, his name would be placed on Colorado’s primary ballots unless the U.S. Supreme Court ruled otherwise or denied to take up his case.
In Arizona, putting Mr. Trump on the ballot was a simpler decision, said Adrian Fontes, the Democratic secretary of state. He said state law required him to list any candidate certified in two other states.
He called the blizzard of court rulings, dissents and conflicting opinions swirling around Mr. Trump’s place on the ballot a “slow civics lesson” that demonstrated the country’s democratic resilience.
“I kind of celebrate the idea that it’s complicated,” he said. “We are having this conversation because that is democracy.”
Mitch Smith And Michael Wines reports contributed.