Election Reform

“Moreover, political parties have the constitutional right to determine the procedure by which they select their nominees, as repeatedly confirmed by the Supreme Court,” Foley said, citing the Supreme Court cases Democratic Party of United States v. Wisconsin ex rel. La Follette and California Democratic Party v. Jones.

“The authority of the national parties to choose their nominee in the event the nominee can’t run comes as a surprise to many in this day of wall-to-wall primaries,” Elaine Kamarck, author of “Primary Politics: Everything You Need to Know about How America Nominates Its Presidential Candidates,” wrote in September. “And yet, it is a reminder that the choice of a nominee is party business — not state law, not federal law, and not constitutional law.”

Foley said there “would be no basis whatsoever for Republicans (or anyone else) to challenge the Democratic Party’s decision to follow its own rules in nominating someone other than Biden.”

According to the Democratic Party’s rules, Foley said, “the presidential preference primaries determined who the convention delegates are; the primary voters did not directly choose the party’s nominee. Biden’s now having voluntarily withdrawn from the race before the delegates nominated him based on his status as presumptive nominee as a result of the primaries, the delegates are free pursuant to the party’s own rules to choose a different person as their nominee. There has been no disenfranchisement of primary voters as a part of the process of the party following its own nomination rules.”