Georgia court rejects local Republican attempt to handpick primary candidates

ATLANTA (AP) — Georgia’s Supreme Court on Tuesday rejected an appeal from a county Republican Party that tried to keep four candidates from running on the GOP ballot because party officials viewed them as ideologically impure.

The court voted 9-0 to dismiss the appeal from the Catoosa County Republican Party, ruling that the party moved too slowly to overturn a lower court ruling. Presiding Justice Nels Peterson, writing for the court, said it would be wrong for the high court to require new Republican primary elections after voters already cast ballots.

“Elections matter. For this reason, parties wanting a court to throw out the results of an election after it has occurred must clear significant hurdles,” Peterson wrote. “And for decades, our precedent has made crystal clear that the first such hurdle is for the parties seeking to undo an election to have done everything within their power to have their claims decided before the election occurred.”

But the court didn’t get to the root of the dispute that divided Republicans in Catoosa and nearby Chattooga County this spring — which is about whether county parties should be able to act as gatekeepers for their primary ballots. The idea was fostered by a group called the Georgia Republican Assembly, which seeks to influence the larger party.

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In a state with no party registration and primaries that allow anyone to vote in the party nominating contest of their choice, it can be hard to tell who is truly a Republican or a Democrat. But Catoosa County Republican officers refused to allow Steven Henry and incumbent Larry Black to run for county commission chair and refused to allow incumbent commissioners Jeffrey Long and Vanita Hullander to seek reelection to their seats on the county commission. All four had previously been elected as Republicans in Catoosa County, a heavily GOP area in Georgia’s northwestern corner that is a suburb of Chattanooga, Tennessee.

A superior court judge in March ordered the four candidates placed on the ballot by county officials after the party balked, even though the judge ordered the sheriff to escort the candidates to the party’s office and threatened party officers with $1,000 fines if they failed to comply.

Black and Hullander lost their primary bids, but Long and Henry won the Republican nomination.

Justice Charlie Bethel, writing in a separate concurrence, said it was likely the high court will eventually have to decide whether county parities can create rules for qualifying candidates in primary elections beyond those found in state law. Bethel said it was unclear to him whether county parties could create additional rules beyond those of the state party. The state Republican Party in 2023 shot down an attempt at banning ideological traitors from primary ballots.

A federal judge in Rome on Sept. 9 dismissed a separate lawsuit that the Catoosa County GOP brought against county election officials, claiming that being forced to put the candidates on the Republican ballot unconstitutionally violated the party’s freedom of association.

U.S. District Judge Billy Ray, a former chair of the Gwinnett County Republican Party, said a party’s associational rights are not “absolute” and that voters should decide primaries.

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“Trying to limit who can run in a primary seems inconsistent with the purpose of a primary to start with,” Ray wrote in a footnote. “Perhaps the Catoosa Republican Party doesn’t believe that the citizens of Catoosa County can for themselves intelligently decide which candidates best embody the principles of the Republican Party.”

He continued, writing that “The Court does not share such sentiment. It seems that our form of government is designed to allow citizens to pick their government leaders, not for insiders (of the local party) to pick the government leaders for them.”

The county party has filed notice that it will appeal the federal case to the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.