Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s zombie campaign is lurching toward Election Day in a characteristically erratic fashion. The independent candidate suspended his run for the White House and endorsed Donald Trump last month, and has since been trying to cherry-pick in which states his name will appear — and not appear — on ballots.
Kennedy presented a bizarre plan when he ended his campaign, claiming that he would be removing his name from contention in critical swing states where his candidacy might spoil a victory for Trump, but would remain a candidate — and encouraged his supporters to vote for him — in other states. Kennedy has hinted that he had been offered a position within a second Trump administration should the former president win in November.
Kennedy managed to remove himself as a choice with relative ease in the battleground states like Pennsylvania, Arizona, and Ohio. But in other swing states, the lengths his campaign is going to to secure last-minute ballot revisions are becoming absurd.
According to a Tuesday report from Slate, Kennedy is petitioning the Wisconsin Supreme Court for an emergency removal of his name from ballots, which are already being printed. Kennedy’s camp is demanding that Wisconsin election officials place stickers over his name to prevent voters from casting a vote in his favor. Election officials in the swing state have called the idea a “logistical and administrative nightmare.”
“With over 1,800 municipal clerks statewide, uniformity of any sticker placement becomes a real concern,” Wood County Clerk Trent Miner told VoteBeat. “Errant sticker placement would produce an error and return the ballot to the voter, uncounted, again sowing distrust in the tabulation and administration of the election.”
Others noted that such a process has not been tested on ballot tabulation machines, and could cause jams or other issues related to the counting of votes.
A day later, Kennedy filed a similar petition in Michigan, where election officials previously denied his bid to have his name removed from the state’s ballots. Kennedy’s camp has requested that the U.S. Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals overturn the decision leveled against him by Michigan’s secretary of state, and that was upheld by both a federal judge and Michigan Supreme Court.
“Here, it is clear that the act of withdrawing conveys the message that a candidate is no longer willing (or able) to hold a particular office if elected,” Kennedy argues, “Any reasonable person understood Mr. Kennedy’s August 23, 2024 speech to convey his decision to suspend his presidential campaign.”
Earlier this month, Kennedy threw a wrench in early voting in the key swing state of North Carolina through a successful emergency motion to remove his name from the ballot. The legal battle and subsequent reprinting of ballots resulted in a two-week delay in the mailing of thousands of absentee ballots and may have cost the state upwards of one million dollars to pull off.
In other states, Kennedy is demanding to have his name restored to ballots.
Kennedy filed an emergency petition to the Supreme Court demanding that the justices overturn multiple rulings in New York that disqualified Kennedy from the ballot on grounds that he falsely claimed to live in the state as his primary residence on his nomination papers.
“Whatever inconvenience the [state] may have in adding Kennedy to the ballot seven weeks before the election, it seems inconceivable that those difficulties or expenses could outweigh the constitutional rights of New York voters,” Kennedy’s filing before the court argues.
On its surface it’s contradictory, but Kennedy’s last-minute scramble to pick and choose where he will appear on ballots is the inevitable culmination of a candidacy that is now seeming to have existed with little intent to actually win the presidency — but instead to ensure Biden didn’t.
As it stands, Kennedy — who became a prominent surrogate for the Trump campaign immediately after his semi-withdrawal — cannot risk siphoning votes away from Trump if he hopes to have a future in his government. In critical swing states, where the polling gap between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris is often within the margin of error, Kennedy may be the tipping point.
