Governor's Race Heating Up: Fagan asks Supreme Court to uphold disqualification of Gov. Candidate Kristof
Nicholas Kristof’s bid for the Oregon Governorship will first have to run through the Oregon Supreme Court to establish whether he was a resident of Oregon. Kristof, who grew up on a farm in Yamhill and has split time between New York and Oregon, is asking for a swift decision from the court to enable his run in this spring’s primary. He quickly gained notice as he amassed a $2.5 million war chest for the Oregon election. He is a former New York Times writer and a Pulitzer Prize winner. Photo from Kristof Facebook page
Secretary of State Shemia Fagan
From the Office of the Oregon Secretary of State Shemia Fagan:
SALEM, OR — The Oregon Department of Justice filed a brief with the Oregon Supreme Court Thursday, Jan. 20, on behalf of Secretary of State Shemia Fagan, asking the Court to uphold the Elections Division’s January 6 disqualification of Nicholas Kristof as a candidate for Oregon Governor.
Article V, section 2, of the Oregon Constitution states that a candidate must be a “resident within” Oregon for the three years before the general election.
“My focus throughout this process has been to make sure Oregonians can trust the accuracy of their ballots,” Secretary Fagan said. “I have a duty to Oregon voters to make sure every candidate on their ballot is qualified to serve.”
Secretary Fagan Continued:
“The Court’s decision, in this case, will establish a precedent for hundreds of decisions local elections officials make every year about what it means to be a “resident” for purposes of running for political office. It’s clear that the framers of the Oregon Constitution understood that residency means an Oregon “domicile,” and that you can only have one domicile at a time. Not only do the objective facts demonstrate that Mr. Kristof was not domiciled in Oregon until late 2020; his legal arguments are impossible to square with an equitable standard for future candidates. They would create irrational results; for example, under the rule, Mr. Kristof proposes, a person would be eligible to run for Governor, or serve as Governor, in two different states at the same time.”
From OPB, Willamette Week and Malheur Enterprise:
Oregon Public Broadcasting (OPB) reported that Kristof filed a petition with the Oregon Supreme Court on Friday, Jan. 7, asking justices to overturn Secretary of State Shemia Fagan’s determination he does not meet the state Constitution’s three-year residency requirement for governor.
“In the absence of this Court’s intervention, voters will be marginalized, and the gubernatorial race will be irreversibly altered by a lone government official applying novel and untested legal reasoning,” Kristof’s attorneys were quoted in the OPB story.
Willamette Week wrote a story on the issue in recent weeks stating, “There is no clear-cut definition of residency for electoral purposes. Officials consider many factors, including where a person sleeps, gets mail, banks, obtains medical care, holds a driver’s license, and engages in civic activities, such as voting. In making their case that Kristof has long been an Oregon resident, Kristof’s attorneys pointed to his having owned property in Yamhill since the early 1990s, having spent significant time on that property every year, and having spent much of his time living there beginning in 2018.”
The Malheur Enterprise reported this morning, Jan. 21, that because of the approaching deadline for primary ballots, the Supreme Court is expected to rule late this month or early next month whether Kristof, who now lives at his family’s farm outside the rural community of Yamhill, meets the three-year requirement in the Oregon Constitution.
From Fagan:
In the brief, Secretary Fagan makes the following points:
At issue is the definition of “resident within” Oregon. When the Constitution was written, residency meant domicile (living permanently) in Oregon. Contemporaneous legal definitions, case law, and even the own words of delegates at Oregon’s Constitutional Convention support this commonsense definition. This long-established standard was placed in the Constitution to ensure candidates had some stake in our state’s political and civic life. It’s clear they did not intend to allow a person to serve if they had been a permanent resident of another state during the years just before their election. The brief refers to this as the “domicile test."
Objective facts demonstrate that Mr. Kristof fails the domicile test. Until December 2020, Mr. Kristof’s primary residence — his legal domicile — was in New York. These facts include: Voting in New York from 1999 through the November 2020 election; Centering his professional and personal life in New York, where he owned a home he used as a base for his job at the New York Times, where he returned to after international travel, and where he enrolled his children in school; Maintaining a driver’s license in New York even though New York law only requires in-state licenses for permanent residents; and Paying income taxes in New York from 1999 to 2020. Based on all the facts before them, elections officials correctly determined Mr. Kristof did not meet the residency requirements to run for Governor of Oregon in 2022 and should not appear on the ballot.
"The rules are the rules and they apply equally to all candidates for office in Oregon,” Secretary Fagan said. “I stand by the determination of the experts in the Oregon Elections Division that Mr. Kristof does not currently meet the Constitutional requirements to run or serve as Oregon Governor.”
