A U.S. House committee led by Republicans on Thursday night passed an overhaul of U.S. voting laws. (Getty Images)
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The legal challenge to the Florida Democratic Party’s (FDP) decision to list only President Joe Biden’s name on the party’s presidential primary ballot in March will go before a federal court next week.
Judge Allen Winsor will hold a hearing on Jan. 10 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern Division of Florida in Tallahassee on whether to issue a preliminary injunction to require Florida Secretary of State Cord Byrd to place any or all of the other candidates running for the Democratic nomination for president on the March 19 Florida Democratic presidential preference primary ballot.
A lawsuit filed by Tampa attorney Michael Steinberg, a former chair of the Hillsborough County Democratic Party, accuses the FDP of violating his constitutional rights as a voter by placing only Biden’s name on the presidential primary ballot, excluding other Democratic candidates who are running.
Steinberg called the decision to exclude the name of Minnesota Congressman Dean Phillips from the ballot to be “arbitrary and capricious,” and in violation of his due process and equal protection rights. He has since amended his lawsuit to include the names of two other Democrats running for president: New Age author Marianne Williamson and media personality Cenk Uygur.
The Florida Democratic Party has maintained that it followed its “standard process” in selecting who would appear on the presidential primary ballot. A spokesperson for the party told the Phoenix last month that when the State Executive Committee met in late October to vote on who would appear on the ballot, the only candidate to receive votes was Joe Biden.
The party says that all information regarding the process for candidates to qualify for the ballot was publicly available on its website well in advance of the qualifying date.
Florida law says that the names of unopposed candidates shall not appear on the ballot. That means that as of now, there will not be a Democratic presidential primary election in March in Florida.
Phillips reacted bitterly last month upon learning that he would not be placed on the ballot and threatened legal action.
He has not filed a lawsuit but has instead submitted a formal “Challenge” to the Democratic National Committee (DNC) regarding the implementation of the Florida Democratic Party Delegate Selection Plan on December 13, the Phoenix has learned. In it he claims that in nominating a single candidate “at a time and through a process undisclosed in the Plan, the FDP failed to properly implement the Plan.”
The Phillips campaign also disputes the FDP’s claim that the party followed its “standard process” for selecting presidential primary candidates, noting that the 2020 Democratic presidential preference primary ballot in Florida identified 16 candidates for inclusion, including Williamson.
“Ms. Williamson was included on the 2020 ballot, even though her support in both national and Florida-specific polls never exceeded 1 percent in the Democratic primary field,” writes Brad Deutsch, the counsel for the Phillips ’24 campaign. “By contrast, Ms. Williamson’s support in nationwide polls for the 2024 primary has tended to range between 4 and 8 percent. It is obvious to any impartial observer that FDP is not applying the same guidelines for selection of primary candidates in 2024 that it did in 2020. If there is a ‘standard process,’ it has not been followed.”
Williamson herself was critical of the FDP and the DNC in an interview with this reporter on WMNF Radio in Tampa last Friday.
Marianne Williamson fields questions from reporters after stepping off the soapbox on Aug. 12, 2023. (Photo by Jay Waagmeester/Iowa Capital Dispatch)
“They’re not telling you the truth when they tell you that these rules were well known to everyone, and they were up on the (web)site and everybody knew that. That’s just untrue,” she said.
As noted, Williamson was on the 2020 presidential primary ballot in Florida when she was polling lower than she is currently against Biden. When asked what her campaign had done differently this time around that resulted in her not being placed on the ballot, she placed the blame on the DNC, saying that they now saw their role as ensuring that Biden is the Democratic presidential nominee in 2024.
“The traditional role of any political party is to stay in the background until the voters have spoken,” she said. “It’s the voters who should be making these decisions. The voters. Not the party.”
Williamson added that while it may have been more apparent to Democrats in Florida that she was a candidate in the 2019-2020 presidential election cycle because of her participation in nationally televised debates, “you would have had to been under a rock over the last few months to not know that Marianne Williamson is a candidate for president. So they chose – this is their manipulation – they’re rushing it through the way they did at a meeting that no one even knew. So when they said to you that these were ‘well known procedures’ that’s simply false. And that’s why there are all these court cases happening.”
If Judge Winsor does grant a preliminary injunction next week, Steinberg says it’s likely that the judge would then set an evidentiary hearing to hear from both sides regarding whether the Florida Democratic Party had a reasonable basis for excluding the other Democratic candidates for president from the ballot.
Requests for comment to both the Florida Democratic Party and the Democratic National Committee were not immediately responded to.
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