Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced on Aug. 23 that he was suspending his 2024 Independent campaign for president, and throwing his support to GOP nominee Donald Trump and his running mate, Senator JD Vance (R-OH). Later that day, he joined the former president and made remarks at a rally in Glendale, Arizona.
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Regular readers might know that there was a caveat in Kennedy’s announcement; part of the impetus for his leaving the race was to not act as a spoiler in the general election, if he could not see a path to victory. So, he officially requested that several swing states take him off their ballots, while remaining on those of other states.
Since then, three of those battleground states–Wisconsin, Michigan, and North Carolina–have refused to remove his name from state ballots. RFK Jr. has now filed a lawsuit against elections officials in the state of North Carolina, seeking to have his name dropped from voters’ consideration:
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is suing North Carolina elections officials in his latest effort to get off state ballots in November.
In a lawsuit filed in Wake County late Friday, the third-party presidential candidate said the North Carolina State Board of Elections decision to reject his party’s request to remove him from the ballot violates elections and free-speech laws.
Would you be surprised to learn that the elections board has a Democrat majority?
The Democratic-controlled board voted 3-2 along party lines during a special meeting Thursday to reject a request from Kennedy’s We The People Party to remove him and running mate Nicole Shanahan.
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Kennedy’s attorneys argued in the filing that “NCSBE ignored controlling statutes and instead elected to insert their own indeterminate, subjective ‘practicality’ standard in denying his request. NCSBE cited no legal authority for its action.”
In his emergency lawsuit, Kennedy says he complied with the law and met the deadline to be removed from ballots. Kennedy alleged that the elections board knew of his desire to be removed the day he suspended his presidential bid — but directed county elections boards to print ballots anyway.
But the Dems claim it’s too much of a hassle, since many of the Old North State’s 100 counties had already started printing ballots before RFK Jr.’s request last Wednesday. As I previously noted, former Pres. Trump cautioned a crowd at a recent rally that some early voting across the country begins in September. North Carolina will start accepting mail-in ballots for November’s election on Sept. 6:
Democrats on the board said Thursday that it would be impractical to reprint ballots given that mail-in voting begins Sept. 6 in North Carolina. About 2 million ballots have been printed so far, officials said.
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Pat Gannon, a spokesman for the elections board, referred questions about the lawsuit to lawyers at the state Departmnet [sic] of Justice. A DOJ spokesperson didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment late Friday.
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The report from WRAL-TV (linked above) added that “Republicans said the board had flexibility under the law to remove We The People and Kennedy from the ballot.”
A Democrat board member, Shioban Millen, clapped back against that notion, during the election board’s meeting on Thursday:
It takes a lot of chutzpah … to request the extraordinary relief of reprinting ballots. The statutory deadline of Sept. 6 can’t be ignored just because of the capricious behavior of one party’s candidate.
As this is a developing story, RedState will provide updates as they become available.
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