Alito rejects Cornel West’s appeal to tell Pennsylvania voters he is write-in option 

Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito on Thursday rejected Cornel West’s ask for an emergency order requiring signs be posted at Pennsylvania polling places next week telling voters they can write in the independent candidate as their choice for president. 

West filed the emergency appeal after lower courts denied his bid to appear on the ballot in the key swing state. 

With Election Day now less than a week away and voting having already begun, West abandoned his effort to appear directly on the ballot when he brought his case to the Supreme Court on Wednesday. 

Instead, he asked for an intervention that would order polling places statewide to advertise to voters he and his running mate, Melina Abdullah, can still receive votes as write-in candidates. 

Alito, who by default handles emergency appeals arising from Pennsylvania, denied West’s application in a one-sentence order without explanation, as is typical. 

West can renew his application to another justice, but historically the prospect of success is slim to none. 

Alito’s order comes after the high court denied a series of ballot access emergency appeals from former independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein. 

The Supreme Court rejected Kennedy’s effort to get on the ballot in New York and to be removed from the ballot in the swing states of Michigan and Wisconsin. Stein unsuccessfully attempted to get on the ballot in Nevada, another key battleground. 

The ballot access cases are not the only election-related matters that have landed on the Supreme Court’s emergency docket, however. 

The court is weighing a request from the Republican National Committee to block Pennsylvanians whose mail votes are voided as “naked ballots,” meaning they don’t have an inner secrecy envelope, from voting provisionally on Election Day. The outcome could impact thousands of votes. 

Earlier this week, the Supreme Court granted an emergency appeal from Virginia election officials, enabling them to resume their purge of more than 1,600 voter registrations suspected as noncitizens.