The Michigan Supreme Court on Wednesday paved the way for Donald J. Trump to appear on the state’s primary ballot, a victory for the former president in a battleground state.
The state’s top court upheld an appeals court decision that found that the former president could appear on the ballot despite questions about his eligibility to hold elected office because of his attempts to overturn the 2020 election.
The Michigan decision followed a bombshell ruling by the Colorado Supreme Court, which on Dec. 19 determined in a 4-3 opinion that Mr. Trump should be removed from the state’s 2024 Republican primary ballot for his role in the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol by a pro-Trump mob.
Mr. Trump applauded the Michigan ruling in a statement posted on his social media platform, Truth Social.
“We have to prevent the 2024 Election from being Rigged and Stolen like they stole 2020,” the statement said.
Ron Fein, the legal director of Free Speech For People, a group seeking to have Mr. Trump disqualified from running in the 2024 election, said the Michigan Supreme Court ruled narrowly, sidestepping the core questions at the heart of the case. The decision, he said, leaves the door open to challenge whether Mr. Trump can appear on the general election ballot in Michigan.
“The Michigan Supreme Court did not rule out that the question of Donald Trump’s disqualification for engaging in insurrection against the U.S. Constitution may be resolved at a later stage,” Mr. Fein said in a statement.
Michigan’s primary will be held Feb. 27.
The question of Mr. Trump’s eligibility is widely expected to be answered by the U.S. Supreme Court. Some form of challenge to Mr. Trump’s eligibility has been lodged in more than 30 states.
Many of those challenges have already been dismissed, and officials in some states, including California, have signaled that they are wary of trying to have Mr. Trump removed. But several challenges are still pending.
Maine’s secretary of state is expected to soon decide whether Mr. Trump can appear on the ballot there after a challenge from voters under the same section of the 14th Amendment. And, in Oregon, the same group that filed the Michigan lawsuit is also seeking to have the courts remove Mr. Trump from the ballot, though the secretary of state there declined to remove Mr. Trump in response to an earlier challenge.
A key difference between the Michigan and Colorado decisions was that the latter followed a trial that established an evidentiary basis to find that Mr. Trump incited a violent uprising after losing the 2020 election.
In Michigan, the lawyers challenging Mr. Trump’s eligibility sought a similar trial, but were turned down by the courts.
The Michigan order included a dissent by Justice Elizabeth M. Welch. While she agreed with the decision allowing Mr. Trump to remain on the primary ballot, Justice Welch argued that the court should have issued a more detailed ruling tackling the legal questions at play.
Justice Welch said that Colorado state law makes clear that political parties may only put forward “qualified” candidates in a primary presidential ballot. Michigan election law includes no such requirement, she wrote. The Michigan secretary of state “lacks the legal authority to remove a legally ineligible candidate from the ballot once their name has been put forward by a political party,” Justice Welch wrote.
Jocelyn Benson, Michigan’s secretary of state, said in a statement on Wednesday that the state’s top court had rightly concluded that she lacked the authority to prevent Mr. Trump form appearing on the primary ballot.
“The U.S. Supreme Court must provide the clarity and finality to this matter,” she wrote. “I continue to hope they do this sooner rather than later to ensure that we can move forward into 2024’s election season focused on ensuring all voters are fully informed and universally engaged in deciding the issues at stake.”
The challengers’ arguments are based on Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which disqualifies anyone from holding federal office if they “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” against the Constitution after having taken an oath to support it.
A lower-court judge previously decided the ballot eligibility case in Mr. Trump’s favor. Judge James Robert Redford of the Court of Claims in Michigan ruled in November that disqualifying a candidate through the 14th Amendment was a political issue, not one for the courts. A lower court in Colorado had also ruled in Mr. Trump’s favor before the Supreme Court there took up the case.
Judge Redford also ruled that Michigan’s top elections official does not have the authority alone to exclude Mr. Trump from the ballot. Free Speech for People, a liberal-leaning group that filed the lawsuit, appealed the ruling, asking the state Supreme Court to hear the case on an accelerated timetable.
Jocelyn Benson, the Michigan secretary of state and a Democrat, echoed the request for a quick decision, citing approaching deadlines for printing paper primary ballots. She wrote that a ruling was needed by Dec. 29 “in order to ensure an orderly election process.”
Jan. 13 is the deadline for primary ballots to be sent to military and overseas voters; absentee voter ballots must be printed by Jan. 18. The state’s presidential primary is set for Feb. 27.
Mitch Smith contributed reporting.
