This article was reprinted with permission from Virginia Mercury.
A federal judge dismissed a lawsuit last week that sought to ban former President Donald Trump from Virginia’s presidential primary and general election ballots due to Trump’s efforts to overturn the result of the 2020 election.
In an opinion issued Dec. 29, U.S. District Judge Leonie M. Brinkema ruled that the pair of activists who filed the suit lacked legal standing to challenge Trump’s eligibility for office because they “totally failed” to show that Trump’s presence on Virginia’s ballot would cause them specific harm.
“Although this increasingly litigated legal question of whether former President Trump may be disqualified from running for or serving in public office raises issues of the utmost importance in our democratic system of self-governance, the Court cannot reach the merits of plaintiff’s claims because it lacks subject-matter jurisdiction,” Brinkema wrote.
The ruling indicates there won’t be any late-breaking developments regarding Trump’s eligibility as a primary candidate in Virginia, where early voting for the state’s March 5 presidential primaries is set to begin Jan.19.
As legal battles continue to play out elsewhere, the question of whether Trump’s role in the events leading up to the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol qualifies as an act of insurrection — which would bar him from holding office — could ultimately be decided by the U.S. Supreme Court.
In the Virginia challenge, the judge drew a distinction between the case before her and recent headline-grabbing decisions by authorities in Colorado and Maine to disqualify Trump from primary ballots on similar grounds. The Colorado Supreme Court and Maine’s secretary of state issued the rulings based on their own states’ election laws, Brinkema wrote, not in response to claims brought in federal court.
“Federal courts across the country have consistently held that individual citizens do not have … standing to challenge whether another citizen is qualified to hold public office,” Brinkema ruled.
Because the suit also named state elections officials as defendants, attorneys in the office of Attorney General Jason Miyares had asked the court to dismiss the case on largely technical grounds. State attorneys said the legal challenge was based on a misunderstanding of how Virginia primaries work, noting that state election officials “do not actively police the eligibility of presidential candidates” in primaries run by the state but overseen by political parties.
The Republican Party of Virginia also sought to intervene, arguing that if allowed to proceed, the lawsuit would threaten GOP voters’ rights to pick their own nominees for office.
In the opinion dismissing the case, Brinkema also chided the plaintiffs, Hampton Roads-area voters Roy L. Perry-Bey and Carlos A. Howard, for a variety of procedural irregularities as they attempted to represent themselves before the court, such as failing to include full contact information and claiming health concerns were preventing them from responding to new filings in a timely manner.
