What makes a Republican a Republican or a Democrat a Democrat? Is it their principles and the policies they believe will best serve their community? Or is it the approval of party leadership?
That’s the question at the heart of a case recently revived by the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which ruled in favor of the Catoosa County GOP in a 2024 challenge to the ballot access of four Republican candidates.
The recent ruling sends the case back to the district court and comes on the heels of the state GOP convention, where delegates passed a resolution seeking to bar Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger from qualifying to run for any office as a Republican.
Raffensperger, who won another term as the state’s top election official in 2022, is seen as a potential candidate for higher office in 2026. But some Republicans dislike him for his refusal to cooperate with President Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss in Georgia and over the state’s use of voting machines over paper ballots.
Josh McKoon, chairman of the Georgia Republican Party, told reporters at the convention he didn’t see a way within state law to keep Raffensperger from qualifying.
But the Georgia Republican Assembly, a group that seeks to make the state party more conservative, said in an email to supporters that the ruling underscores McKoon’s “legal right and responsibility to enforce the resolution passed at the state convention” keeping Raffensperger off the ballot.
McKoon could not be reached for comment this week.
‘It’s a matter of rights for the voters’
The case involves four candidates who ran for the county commission last year, all either incumbents or former members. Incumbent Jeff Long and Chairman Steven Henry won their seats, while incumbent commissioners Vanita Hullander and Larry Black both lost in GOP primary runoffs.
The county party said the four should not be able to run as Republicans because local party leaders said the candidates did not share their values and policy prescriptions.
When asked via email what the candidates did, GRA President Nathaniel Darnell referred the Recorder to a 2024 statement and video outlining votes and stances he said do not comply with conservative principles, including on taxes, COVID-19 vaccine mandates, regulations on backyard chickens and the endorsement of a Democratic candidate.
In a statement posted to social media, Henry said the matter could have major ramifications for who can and can’t run for office.
“Ballot access is not just a matter of fairness for the candidate – it’s a matter of rights for the voters,” the commission chairman wrote. “Each citizen has the right to support and vote for the candidate of their choice. If candidates are removed from the ballot, it effectively silences the voices of those who support them.”
Henry said the assembly’s favored candidate who opposed him only got around a quarter of the vote in the primary but could have been elected to county chair if he had been barred from the group had their way, which he said would have silenced the majority of Catoosa County Republican voters.
“Upholding open access to the ballot protects the voices of the people and reinforces the core democratic value that government is by the people and for the people,” he said.
Legal battles
The four sued in Catoosa County Superior Court, which issued an order requiring the county party to allow them to qualify.
The Catoosa County GOP refused to comply, and on March 8, 2024, the final day to qualify, the court issued an order directing the board of elections to circumvent the party and qualify the candidates as Republicans for the primary.
The county party and its chair, Joanna Hildreth, sued at the state and federal level. Hildreth is also secretary of the Georgia Republican Assembly.
As a work-around, the county party proposed ballot questions that would have notified primary voters that the county party did not support the four:
“1. Do you think anti-Trump Democrats should be able to get a court order to force the elections board to qualify them as Republican candidates for office?
- Did you know that Steven Henry, Vanita Hullander, Jeff Long, and Larry Black were not approved to run as Republicans by the Republican Party?”
In an email to the Catoosa GOP, Raffensperger’s office said the “Secretary of State cannot
publish party questions on the ballot that contain the names of candidates or commentary regarding those candidates, as that constitutes unlawful electioneering.”
Whether that is true under state law will also be under question when the case returns to the lower court.
Last year, the state Supreme Court dismissed the county GOP’s appeal and declined to weigh in on the underlying issue, whether local parties should be able to determine who can and cannot run under that party’s banner in elections.
In a separate lawsuit in federal court, U. S. District Judge William Ray II seemed to indicate that they cannot in his ruling against the party.
“Trying to limit who can run in a primary seems inconsistent with the purpose of a primary to start with,” he wrote. “Perhaps the Catoosa Republican Party doesn’t believe that the citizens of Catoosa County can for themselves intelligently decide which candidates best embody the principles of the Republican Party. The Court does not share such sentiment. It seems that our form of government is designed to allow citizens to pick their government leaders, not for insiders (of the local party) to pick the government leaders for them.”
But the 11th Circuit found that Ray was in error. In its ruling, the court cited a 1992 decision keeping Louisiana white supremacist presidential candidate David Duke off of the Republican ballot in Georgia.
“We noted that Supreme Court precedent recognized ‘the legitimacy of a political party’s exclusion of a candidate in the party primary in order to protect itself from those with adverse political principles,’” the ruling reads. “And we concluded that the party’s right to freedom of association ‘encompasses its decision to exclude Duke as a candidate on the Republican Primary ballot because Duke’s political beliefs are inconsistent with those of the Republican Party.’ Here, Plaintiffs have established an actual, particularized, and concrete burden on their freedom of association.”
Darnell celebrated the ruling in a statement.
“We felt confident this would eventually happen as the case made its way up the ladder in the federal appeals process because SCOTUS precedent on this subject is so clearly favorable to the Catoosa GOP’s position,” he said.
This story was provided by WABE content partner Georgia Recorder.
