Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced on August 23 that he was suspending his independent 2024 presidential campaign and pledging his support to Republican nominee Donald Trump and his running mate, Senator JD Vance (R-OH). Later that day, he joined the former president in speaking at a rally in Glendale, Arizona.
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BREAKING NEWS: RFK Jr. drops out of the presidential campaign … and supports Donald Trump
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Regular readers may know that Kennedy’s announcement came with a caveat. One of the reasons he withdrew from the race was that he didn’t want to be a spoilsport in the general election when he saw no path to victory. So he officially requested that several swing states remove him from their ballots, while keeping him on the ballot in other states.
Since then, three of those swing states – Wisconsin, Michigan and North Carolina – have refused to remove his name from the ballot. RFK Jr. has now Lawsuit filed against election officials in the state of North Carolina, with the aim of removing his name from the electoral districts:
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is suing North Carolina election officials in his latest attempt to be excluded from the state’s ballot in November.
In a lawsuit filed delayed Friday in Wake County, a 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 violated election and free speech laws.
Would it surprise you to learn that there is a Democratic majority on the Electoral College?
The Democratic-controlled board rejected a motion by Kennedy’s We The People Party to remove him and his running mate Nicole Shanahan from office by a 3-2 vote along party lines during a special meeting on Thursday.
Kennedy’s lawyers argued in the lawsuit that “NCSBE ignored relevant law and instead chose to apply its own vague, subjective ‘practicability’ standard to deny his request. NCSBE relied on no legal basis for its actions.”
In his emergency suit, Kennedy says he followed the law and met the deadline to remove ballots. Kennedy claimed the Board of Elections knew of his desire to be removed from the ballot the day he suspended his presidential bid – but he instructed county boards of elections to print ballots anyway.
But Democrats claim it’s too much effort, since many of the Old North State’s 100 counties had already started printing ballots before RFK Jr.’s request last Wednesday. As I mentioned, former President Trump warned the crowd at a recent rally that early voting across the country begins in part in September. North Carolina will begin accepting mail-in ballots for the November election on September 6:
Democrats on the panel said Thursday it would be impractical to reprint ballots because mail-in voting in North Carolina begins Sept. 6. About 2 million ballots have been printed so far, officials said.
…
Pat Gannon, a spokesman for the Election Commission, referred questions about the lawsuit to attorneys for the State Department [sic] of the Justice Department. A Justice Department spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment delayed Friday.
The WRAL-TV report (link above) continued: “Republicans said the panel had the flexibility under the law to remove We The People and Kennedy from the ballot.”
A Democratic board member, Shioban Millen, contradicted that notion during Thursday’s election committee meeting:
It takes a lot of chutzpah… to request the extraordinary relief of having ballots reprinted. The statutory deadline of September 6 cannot be ignored just because of the capricious behavior of one party’s candidate.
Since this is a developing story, RedState will provide updates as they become available.
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