Petitioners appeal Trump ballot ruling to Colorado Supreme Court
EDITOR'S NOTE: A previous version of this story misstated the parties involved in filing the appeal. It has been corrected.
A group of Colorado voters is appealing a legal ruling from a Denver District Judge, who said former President Donald Trump was eligible to be on the state's 2024 presidential ballot, to the Colorado Supreme Court.
Attorneys representing the voters filed the appeal with the state Supreme Court on Monday night and asked for expedited consideration, due to the Jan. 5 deadline, when ballots must certified for Colorado's March 5 presidential primary election.
District Court Judge Sarah B. Wallace said in her ruling last week that she found that Trump did in fact "engage in insurrection" on Jan. 6, 2021 and rejected his attorneys' arguments that he was simply engaging in free speech. Normally, that would be enough to disqualify him under Section 3, but she said she couldn't do so for a presidential candidate.
Advocates this year have been trying to remove Trump from the ballot in Colorado and other states under Section Three of the 14th Amendment, which bars from office those who swore an oath to uphold the U.S. Constitution and then "engaged in insurrection" against it. The measure has only been used a handful of times since the period after the Civil War.
At the heart of the appeal is the following question, according to the court filing:
Did the district court commit reversible error in ruling that Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment, which disqualifies people who engaged in insurrection against the Constitution after taking an oath to support the Constitution, does not apply to Presidents who engage in insurrection or to insurrectionists wanting to be President?
