raicha wrote:
If the plaintiff/candidate does not appear on the ballot, the chances of winning are ZERO percent. It is not possible to lower the chances of winning below zero percent. It is not possible to harm someone by lowering their chances to win if the chance is already zero percent.
The harm is not certain. The harm is not speculative. The harm is non-existent unless the plaintiff/candidate is qualified to appear on a ballot, thus creating a chance of winning above ZERO.
](./images/smilies/brickwall.gif "brickwall")
That is the case only if write-in votes are absolutely prohibited.
I'm also not talking strictly theoretically. I lived in York, Pennsylvania, when Mayor Charlie Robertson was running for reelection. It came out during his campaign that he had been a police officer during race riots in 1969 in that city, and had handed out bullets to vigilantes and white supremacists, telling them to "kill as many niggers as you can" and stating that if he were not a police officer, he would personally be leading "commando raids" to assist in white supremacist violence. White rioters, perhaps armed with his bullets, later shot and murdered Lillie Belle Allen, who mistakenly wandered into an area of violence. There were also white victims of violence during the riots,
discussed here.
A popular primary challenger, Ray Crenshaw, came in second in the primary election. He "happened to be black." Robertson lied about the likelihood of his indictment for murder, the only charge he still faced for his white supremacist violence decades later. Only after coming in first in the primary did he finally admit he was likely to be indicted for murder. In any reasonable situation, they would have run a second primary or given the spot to the guy who came in second place. Of course, he "happened to be black" in a pretty racist area of Pennsylvania.
The local Democratic Party simply bypassed democracy, literally, since the city of York would never elect a Republican. Had the racist white supremacist Charlie Robertson not lied about his nearly inevitable indictment for murder, a rap he beat, Crenshaw would almost certainly have been the nominee. Instead, the local Democratic Party picked John Brenner, who subsequently won the election. I will note that I have nothing whatsoever against Brenner, who turned out to be a perfectly good mayor, and as far as I know, he had nothing to do with the racist decision to bypass the voters and basically appoint him mayor. Nevertheless, if democracy had prevailed, Ray Crenshaw would have been mayor.
However, Crenshaw subsequently ran on a write-in campaign. After being excluded from the ballot, he won over 20% of the vote (including mine). The Democratic Party did everything imaginable to discourage any attempt to write him in and to drive away anyone attempting to explain the write-in process, on outmoded lever machines from the 19th century used in the city, especially in the precincts likely to favor a write-in candidate. To write him in required using an incredibly arcane process it is difficult to imagine most people could understand without explanation. In fact, I, someone who considers myself to have a pretty good grasp of electoral procedures, took a few minutes to grasp exactly how to do a write-in on one of these antiquated machines.
I am therefore highly reluctant simply to rule out someone as having standing to challenge an election based on some notion that if they aren't on the ballot, they are absolutely never going to win and aren't a legitimate candidate. This is a process used by the two major parties to make a literal joke out of the idea of democracy.
I am not supporting this particular lawsuit, which has so many problems and is frivolous in so many ways that have already been detailed that there is no need to recount them. I am just giving a particular example from my own life that causes me to contest, strongly, the idea that simply not being on the ballot means one shouldn't have standing to raise any challenge to what
is on the ballot.
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