I have written this piece for Slate. It begins:

With news of President Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the presidential race, some Republicans are claiming he cannot be removed from the presidential ballot in November and in any case it is undemocratic to do so. The first claim is legally unsupported and the second one is ludicrous. I fully expect the Democrats’ legitimate nominees for president and vice-president to be listed on the ballot in November….

To the extent that there’s even the hint of a legal issue, it’s not over whether it’s Biden or someone else who is the Democrats’ nominee, but about the timing of choosing the official nominee. The key is that nomination happens in time to get the candidate on the ballot in each state. For instance, Ohio originally had a ballot deadline that was before the Democratic National Convention, leading to a risk that no Democratic nominee would be listed on the ballot in that state. Ohio changed its law to a later deadline to accommodate the late convention. As I explained at Election Law Blog, there’s a hyper technical argument that Ohio could still contend that a nomination coming from Democrats after their convention would be too late. This was the purported reason Democrats were going to do an early virtual roll-call vote to choose Biden. (I think the real reason for an early roll call was for partisans to lock Biden in, not to avoid litigation)…

In a handful of other states, including Washington state, there is a different ballot access timing issue that could trigger a lawsuit. (The issue is even more technical and has to do with an election administrator’s power to extend a legislative deadline in a presidential election.) For this reason, Democrats would be smart to still do that virtual roll call by August 7 if they’ve coalesced around Vice President Kamala Harris or another candidate. That would avoid even the small risk of a serious lawsuit.

But even if the DNC holds an open convention and the nomination comes during the convention, I am confident that the Democrats’ nominee will be on the ballot in all 50 states, either because legislatures will change the rules to grant ballot access to the Democrats’ nominee or courts will require it.

And then this brings us to the complaints that there’s something anti-democratic about this whole process, that it is somehow overturning the will of the Biden voters in choosing a new nominee. This is a crazy complaint. Until the 1960s, it was not uncommon for party nominees to be chosen by party insiders. We even have the cliched “smoke-filled room” where this used to happen. The undemocratic nature of that process led to the party reform we have today where most delegates are chosen by the people and vote at the convention.

If Biden wanted to remain in the race and delegates who were chosen for Biden in the primary process decided to vote for someone else, there would be something to this small-d democracy argument. Voters wanted Biden and the delegates didn’t listen.

But Biden has withdrawn. He’s voluntarily decided he can’t go forward. The party has democratic procedures in place for such an eventuality, just as if a candidate dies before being nominated. The whole point of doing a convention is to have a safety valve for something like this. (And I always fear what would happen if a candidate dies after nomination and listing on the ballot, when things could get very dicey.)…

It takes a special kind of chutzpah for Trump supporters to say it’s a “coup” when Democrats conduct a fair and democratic process for replacing a withdrawn candidate. Trumpists could learn a lot about the democratic process in watching what’s happening on the other side of the aisle.