Why Cornel West isn’t on Florida’s presidential ballot

Screenshot of Cornel West video announcing his presidential candidacy, via X.Despite earlier claims by his campaign, Cornel West is not on the Florida presidential ballots that supervisors of elections are sending to overseas and military voters, giving Floridians dissatisfied with Donald Trump and Kamala Harris one less option to vote for president this year.

“The West campaign made a diligent effort to secure ballot access in Florida; however, due to administrative technicalities, our nomination was not accepted by the Secretary of State,” Edwin DeJesus with the West campaign told the Phoenix earlier this week.

Those “technicalities” include an incomplete listing of the addresses of the presidential electors which had to be sent to the Florida Secretary of State’s office by Aug. 24.

“That’s on me,” admits Joe Wendt, chair of the Florida Natural Law Party, the slate on which West had intended to run.

Some of the presidential electors had omitted parts of their address information submitted to the Department of State, Wendt said, an omission he failed to catch when he sent the paperwork to the state’s offices in Tallahassee.

But he didn’t get a fair shake from the state, Wendt insists, because officials gave him the chance to correct his own title on the paperwork but didn’t do the same for the electors’ addresses.

“I’m not saying I’m an angel in this as well, because I did have the oversight to make sure the addresses were intact, but that’s why you submit it,” he said.

“If the state’s not reviewing it and letting us know what the issues are before the deadline, how are we going to correct it? And if they have the time to look at the letter, and say that the title I used was wrong, they had enough time to review our list of electors and tell us about any deficiencies in our list of electors.”

Despite repeated attempts, the Florida Division of Elections did not return a request for comment.

The West campaign sent out a press release on July 22 declaring that the Natural Law Party had formally nominated West and Dr. Melina Abdullah to be their presidential ticket in both Florida and Mississippi.

Unaware of a problem

Their campaign appeared to be unaware there was a problem with West getting on the ballot as recently as Monday. DeJesus said at that time that “we’re still gathering information regarding the campaign’s ability for the ballot.”

In February, West said he was going to form his own political party (called the Justice for All Party) and would hold a political convention, which under Florida election law would obviate the need to collect signatures to get on the ballot.

Then, in early July, he announced that he would compete for the Green Party nomination, which already had ballot access in Florida, before opting not to go that route. Jill Stein won the party’s presidential nomination last month.

Acknowledging ballots have already been mailed out, Wendt said the Natural Law Party of Florida has found a ballot expert to help it and is looking for legal counsel to challenge the state’s decision, “because what the state did was unprofessional, borderline incompetent.”

There are nine candidates running for president on the Florida ballot. Along with Trump, Harris, and Stein, they are Libertarian candidate Chase Oliver, anti-abortion activist Randall Terry of the Constitution Party of Florida, Claudia De la Cruz with the Party for Socialism and Liberation, and Peter Sonski with the American Solidarity Party.

There are two write-in candidates as well – Shiva Ayyadurai and Cherunda Fox.