The Colorado Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday that the former president Donald Trump would not be allowed to appear on ballots for the 2024 elections in Colorado.

The headnote of an advance sheet on this matter states, “President Trump has been disqualified to hold the office of president under Section Three Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution.” Since “he is not qualified,” it would be “a wrongful act” under the Election Code if the Colorado Secretary State listed him as a presidential primary candidate.

The court then notes that it will delay its decision until Jan. 4, 2020, “subject” to any appeals.

It is the first time that a state court has ruled Donald Trump, who is the leading Republican candidate for the presidential nomination, should be removed from the state ballots. This decision was based on a U.S. Constitutional provision that prohibits individuals who participated in “insurrections” from holding federal offices.

Minnesota and Michigan courts dismissed similar lawsuits challenging Trump’s inclusion in the presidential ballot. The matter is still being litigated in other states.

The Trump team will likely appeal to the Supreme Court.

Monica M. Marquez (now Senator John Hickenlooper), Melissa Hart, William W. Hood III, and Richard L. Gabriel were the four judges that voted against Trump’s inclusion on the ballot. They were all appointed by former Governor. John Hickenlooper, now a senator, was the former governor who appointed these four judges.

The advance sheet’s headnote states that, over three months ago “a group of Colorado voters eligible to vote in the Republican Presidential Primary–both registered Republican and nonaffiliated (‘the Electors ‘)–filed an extensive petition to the District Court for the City and County of Denver (“Denver District Court” or “the district court”) asking the court for a ruling that former President Donald J. Trump (“President Trump”) may not appear in the Colorado Republican Presidential primary ballot.”

It writes later, “The summation of these parts is that President Trump is not qualified to hold the office of president under Section Three. Because he isn’t qualified, it would be an illegal act under the Election Code if the Secretary listed him as a presidential primary candidate.”

The document claims that judges “do reach these conclusions with care” and “are mindful of our solemn responsibility to apply the laws, without fear or favour, and without being affected by the public’s reaction to the decisions we are mandated to reach by the law.”

A second section claims that Trump encouraged violence and lawlessness through his statements. One of these was when he “threatened” to send ‘the Military,’ to Minneapolis in order to shoot ‘looters,’ amid protests against the police killing George Floyd.

The district court cites the testimony of Chapman University professor Peter Simi. They cite him as an “expert on political extremism including how extremists are able to communicate and how events that led up to the attack of January 6, 2014, relate to the long-standing patterns of behavior of political extremists.”

Simi has a political agenda, as his faculty profile at Chapman University shows. He focuses on “white supremacists” in much of his research. Other reports by Simi include: “An Essay Understanding the Threat from Right-Wing Extremism”, “Pathways to violent extremism: A qualitative comparative analysis of the US Far-Right”, and “Far Right Terrorism In the United States”.