Taxpayers could pay for striking Kennedy’s name
Elections staffs across North Carolina had prepared over 100,000 absentee ballots to go into the mail on Friday as the law requires. A lawsuit by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. put a halt to it:
The State Board of Elections has appealed Friday’s order by the NC Court of Appeals, which required election officials to remove Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s name from 2024 general election ballots and print new ones. The appeal was filed with the NC Supreme Court Friday afternoon.
As the Supreme Court considers the appeal, State Board staff will work through the weekend to begin the process of coding new ballots without Kennedy’s name and providing proofs of the new ballots to county boards of elections for review. There are 2,348 different ballot styles statewide for the 2024 general election. More than 2.9 million ballots had already been printed before the order by the Court of Appeals.
The State Board instructed county Directors to hold and not destroy ballots already prepared until the matter is resolved.
CNN Dana Bash challenged Democrats’ state chair, Anderson Clayton, Friday afternoon, presenting the “political argument.” Would Democrats be arguing for Kennedy’s name to remain on the ballot if they did not feel his presence would hurt Donald Trump? In trying to paint the matter as partisan wrangling, Bash misses the point.
Kennedy fought to get on the ballot, as Clayton noted. (Yes, Democrats in multiple states fought that, including in North Carolina.) Kennedy having won recognition of his We The People party, the state reprinted voter registration forms by the hundreds of thousands to include that identification as a choice for his voters.*
But Kennedy delayed withdrawing from the presidential race until August 23. The North Carolina State Board of Elections denied his formal request on August 29 to have his name removed, stating, “Approximately 2 million ballots statewide have already been printed with Kennedy’s name on them, and the first ballots will be sent to absentee voters in eight days.”
This week Kennedy turned his denied late request into a legal demand.
If the GOP-dominated state Supreme Court rules for Kennedy, those 2,348 ballot styles will have to be reformatted, reproofed, reprinted, mailings re-prepared by staff, and voting machines recoded in 100 counties. Boards of election are scrambling over the weekend to tally the unplanned costs in manhours and material to local boards and county taxpayers across the state. It’s the first question voters asked our local board (Buncombe County). The delay could cost weeks and impact voters as well.
“As of late Thursday afternoon, county boards of elections had received 130,400 absentee ballot requests, including more than 12,300 requests from military and overseas voters,” the State Board said in a press statement. More than 2.9 million ballots had been printed before the Court of Appeals’ order on Friday, reports WCNC Charlotte.
North Carolina’s absentee ballots are the first in the nation to mail out, but Kennedy’s eleventh-hour legal demands may impact other states as well. Michigan, for one (The Guardian):
In Michigan, a state appellate court also ruled on Friday that Kennedy’s name as the Natural Law party’s candidate must be stricken from ballots. The Michigan secretary of state’s office said it would appeal to the state supreme court.
Kennedy has been fighting to remove his name from ballots in swing states ever since dropping out and endorsing Donald Trump. Speaking to reporters after the endorsement, Kennedy said that his polling consistently showed he would “likely hand the election over to the Democrats” in battleground states where he was on the ballot.
Kennedy has also sued Wisconsin to have his name removed from ballots there.
Donald Trump is, of course, pleased with the delay (The Hill):
“And that sounds like a bad thing for him. It’s not, it’s actually a great thing,” Trump said Friday in remarks to leaders of the Fraternal Order of Police in Charlotte. “He’s an incredible team player.”
“Some people wouldn’t realize it, so rather than voting for us they vote for him, and that wouldn’t’ help us very much, would it?” Trump continued. “It means that all of those who love Bobby — and there’s a lot of them — and all that he stands for, especially regarding the health and well being of us, can vote for me now. So all of the Bobby people are going to vote for me.”
Kennedy’s presidential bid did not go as planned. Now he and Trump expect taxpayers to pay to cancel his vanity project no matter the public cost and inconvenience. That describes Republicans’ past efforts (and future plans) to throw sand in the gears of democracy across the U.S.
* Tom Fiedler of the Asheville Watchdog finds “In the eight weeks or so that [Kennedy’s] We The People party has been among the options for registering voters, the number of Buncombe County residents choosing to join is … 0. That’s zero. Zippo. None.”