The trial over an effort in Minnesota to keep former President Donald Trump off of the 2024 ballot began Thursday at the state Supreme Court as a similar case continued in Colorado.
The lawsuits in both states allege Trump should be barred from the 2024 ballot for his conduct leading up to the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol. They argue Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results violated Section 3 of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, which says no one who has “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” after swearing an oath to support and defend the Constitution can hold office.
A group of Minnesota voters, represented by the election reform group Free Speech for People, sued in September to remove Trump from the state ballot under the 14th Amendment provision. The petitioners include former Minnesota Secretary of State Joan Growe and former state Supreme Court Justice Paul H. Anderson.
Technically Minnesota doesn’t have to allow anyone on its ballots, if they have legal justification to prevent them. And there is precedent for this. Alabama kept Harry Truman off their ballot in 1948, even though he was the incumbent president.
If Trump is convicted in Georgia he would run afoul of Minnesota fair campaign section of the state constitution (211B), or hell, I think he has already been fined for infractions that qualify as legal justification to remove him from the ballot in MN based on both campaign finance laws and the fair campaigns section of the MN state constitution.
As the GOP has been doing for the last decade, they have been eroding the federal ability to monitor and manage states’ elections (reducing the voting rights act, etc) current precedent is that the state has the right to handle matters with regard to elections with near impunity.