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Last Friday was the deadline for the Alabama Democratic Party to certify the candidates that will appear on the ballot in November’s upcoming election. The ADP did not finalize the ballot with Secretary of State Wes Allen’s office until that afternoon.
This last-minute filing comes after the DNC held a virtual roll-call vote in early August to officially place Vice President Harris at the top of the Democratic ticket, making last week’s convention in Chicago little more than a formality and giving state Democrats even more time to file their paperwork and certify the candidates.
Even so, the ADP had to submit the paperwork twice last Friday, after their initial filing failed to include two rather important names among the list of candidates that will appear on the ballot: Vice President Kamala Harris and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz — the Democrats’ presidential and vice presidential nominees.
Harris and Walz had been acknowledged as the party’s nominees elsewhere in the first set of paperwork, but were still absent on the official list of candidates to be added to the ballot. Other, more minute amendments were also introduced in the second filing.
Critics of Alabama’s Democratic Party have been particularly vocal about its dysfunctional behavior as of late. The state party engaged in a highly publicized battle with its national counterpart ahead of last week’s convention, threatening to send a separate panel of delegates to Chicago after the Biden administration supplanted the ADP’s proposed delegation with what ADP chairman Randy Kelley referred to as “fake delegates chosen by an ad hoc group.” According to Democratic Party rules, Biden was well within his rights to do so.
DNC chairman Jamie Harrison responded to Kelley by telling him to stop sending “misinformation and miscommunication” to DNC-selected delegates in a letter obtained by APR earlier this month.
Investigative reporter and columnist Josh Moon referred to the party’s public in-fighting as “absurd. And unhelpful. And embarrassing” in a recent column for the APR.
This back-and-forth with the DNC seemingly left the ADP with little time to get their ducks in a row before the ballot certification deadline came to pass last Friday. Meanwhile the ADP claimed on their official Twitter (X) account that the last-minute filing was the plan all along: “The paperwork has been filed and the entities involved were all in agreement as to the filing occurring on this date.”
That post was made prior to the ADP amending their initial filing in order to ensure that Harris and Walz would be listed on the ballot.
In response to the recent DNC drama and apparent last-minute filing scramble, AL.com columnist Kyle Whitmire called the ADP “a far cry from a functional second party — one that inspires confidence in its candidates instead of conflict, one more concerned with its rivals outside than in.”
Regardless, the ADP was ultimately successful in certifying its list of candidates. Those names will appear on November’s ballots just a little over two months from now.
