The Green Party candidate will not be on the California gubernatorial ballot

from Yue Stella YuCalMatters

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A Sacramento judge on Thursday dismissed a Green Party candidate’s lawsuit against California Secretary of State Shirley Weber’s office seeking to get on the June gubernatorial primary ballot, concluding that he failed to file the correct tax returns in time to qualify.

Rudolph “Butch” Ware, an associate professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who is running for governor, claims Weber’s office wrongfully disqualified him even after he filed the necessary tax documents. He also said a 2019 state law requiring gubernatorial candidates to file five years of tax returns to qualify for the ballot is unconstitutional.

Ware said that as he tried to meet the March 6 filing deadline, he received “conflicting and confusing messages” from Weber’s office asking him repeatedly to correct “deficiencies” such as inconsistent declarations and inappropriately redacted names. That, he said, led him to believe Webber was “arbitrarily establishing thresholds … for crossing and jumping obstacles” to disqualify him.

His attorneys argued in court Thursday that he corrected those errors and there was a full set of correct, matching tax returns for all five years among the various returns he filed.

Weber’s office disputed his claims, arguing that Ware’s documents contained numerous inconsistencies, including a missing company name, a partial date and missing values ​​in certain fields. Sacramento Superior Court Judge James Arguelles dismissed Ware’s claim Thursday, saying the secretary of state had clearly demonstrated his attempt to work with Ware to correct his documents.

Ware dismissed the decision as a conspiracy by the “Democratic establishment” to keep him off the ballot. He said he would appeal the decision and file a separate federal lawsuit against Weber.

“We will participate in this vote,” he said. “If they continue with their fraudulent, dirty tricks, covering up and carrying water for a scared Democrat administration, then we will defeat them in write-in voting.”

Ware is one of at least two gubernatorial candidates this year challenging the law’s tax requirements. He argued in his lawsuit that the Legislature “does not have the authority to add additional qualification requirements” as it did in 2019.

Weber’s office argued that state lawmakers have the power to apply “reasonable” requirements to candidates to protect the election process. While Arguelles has not ruled on the law’s constitutionality, he echoed the secretary of state’s argument and said a law is considered constitutional unless the unconstitutionality is “clearly” and “unmistakably” present.

The The California Supreme Court in 2019 reversed a previous piece of legislation that would have forced presidential candidates — including President Donald Trump — to release tax returns, which Democrats argued would help inform voters.

But the justices ruled that requirement unconstitutional because of concerns that it could allow state lawmakers to mandate other disclosures that the California Constitution does not expressly require.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and is republished under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives license.