On Thursday, Maine became the second state to exclude Donald Trump from the primary election ballot following a ruling by its top election official that the former president was not eligible to run for office again due to his attempts to stay in office following the 2020 election. A few hours later, California, the most populous state in the union, declared that Trump would stay on the ballot. In this state, election officials have little authority to remove candidates.
In her ruling, Maine’s Democratic secretary of state Shenna Bellows stated that Trump’s involvement in the Capitol attack disqualified him from the ballot.
A few people had contested his eligibility, alleging that he had encouraged an uprising and was therefore ineligible to run for president under the 14th Amendment of the Constitution.
Bellows’ choice comes in response to a Colorado Supreme Court decision made last week to bar Trump from appearing in the state’s Republican primary. The Maine and Colorado rulings, according to a Trump campaign spokesman, were “partisan election interference efforts”.
Tensions in the country over democracy, voting rights, and the rule of law are highlighted by the rulings in Maine and Colorado. They also heighten calls for the US Supreme Court to step in and resolve the contentious political dispute surrounding Trump’s eligibility. Lawyers on both sides are requesting advice from the country’s highest court regarding a mysterious provision of a post-Civil War, which is the main focus of the campaign to prevent Trump from running for president a third time, constitutional amendment just weeks before the first ballots in the 2024 election are scheduled to be cast.
