A coalition of voters in Illinois is seeking to keep former President Donald Trump off the state’s ballots in the latest attempt to disqualify Trump from seeking office by using an “insurrection” clause of the 14th Amendment.
Five voters say Trump should not be able to run as a presidential candidate and are suing to have the State Board of Elections block him from appearing on the state’s March 19 primary and Nov. 5 general election ballots, according to a filing obtained by the Chicago Sun-Times.
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Lawyers for the group said Trump should be disqualified under a provision of the 14th Amendment that bars insurrectionists from holding public office, arguing he encouraged rioters to descend upon the U.S. Capitol during the Jan. 6, 2021, riot.
Illinois’s election board has suggested that the courts or the state legislature should decide whether to invoke Section 3 of the 14th Amendment as a basis to block a candidate rather than the board itself.
However, the voters say the state’s election board should make the call.
“We’re not engaging in politics here. We’re engaging in the application of constitutional principles,” said Matthew Piers, a civil rights attorney and president of the Hughes Socol Piers Resnick & Dym law firm, which aided in drafting the lawsuit.
If the State Board of Elections does defer the question to the courts, the dispute could move into a state court system where the matter could ultimately land before the Illinois Supreme Court, where Democrats hold a 5-2 majority.
The same 14th Amendment argument has led to more than 30 lawsuits seeking to bar Trump from state primary ballots across the nation, including a Colorado Supreme Court ruling last month that found Trump did “engage” in insurrection on the day of the riot and thereby disqualified him from the ballot. Maine’s Democratic secretary of state made a similar decision on her own one week later, declaring Trump ineligible for the ballot in that state as well. The separate decisions are on hold, and Trump has appealed both, with the U.S. Supreme Court now facing requests to settle the Colorado dispute by Trump and the Colorado Republican Party as of Wednesday evening.
Meanwhile, both Michigan and Minnesota high courts have allowed Trump to remain on primary ballots, and California‘s secretary of state decided last week that Trump could remain on the primary ballot.
More than 30 states have seen lawsuits seeking to remove Trump from primary election ballots, according to Lawfare, a nonpartisan group tracking such litigation. Judges in several states have dismissed the claims, and lawsuits are now pending in 16 states including Illinois. Two others, Colorado and Maine, have ruled to remove Trump from the ballot, though those decisions are on hold pending appeals.
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The former president has decried such attempts to bar him from ballots as a sign of a “banana republic” and has said Democrats are attempting to uproot democracy and take away voters’ rights to choose the candidate of their preference. Trump is leading in the polls against other Republican candidates by wide margins.
Trump is facing 91 criminal charges spread across four indictments and has urged the Supreme Court to quickly decide the disputes.
