RFK ballot fight leaves voters in limbo
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Greg Skidmore photo
He fought to get on the ballot, and then fought to get off the ballot.
Now, after a favorable ruling from North Carolina’s highly politicized Supreme Court, anti-vax conspiracy theorist and Trump endorser Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. will have his name removed from North Carolina ballots, costing counties large and small, rural and urban, thousands upon thousands of dollars and delaying the start of absentee voting in a crucial swing state.
Kennedy’s campaign for president has long been an exercise in political opportunism. When Democrats rejected his candidacy in 2023, he forged an independent bid as an increasingly bizarre series of stories began to emerge, some from the candidate himself — bear cub roadkill dropped in New York’s Central Park as a joke; cutting a dead whale’s head off with a chainsaw and strapping it to the family car; a worm that died after eating some of his brain.
Nearly his entire family, the once-powerful Kennedy clan, rebuked his run, accusing him of trying to cash in on the family’s unimpeachable legacy of public service and sacrifice.
On Aug. 23, Kennedy suspended his campaign and endorsed former President Donald Trump, completing an unlikely journey from left to the right. Less than a week later, Kennedy’s new “We the People” party, hastily organized in North Carolina about than a month prior, formally requested that Kennedy’s name be removed from ballots in North Carolina — after nearly 3 million ballots had already been printed and just eight days before the start of absentee voting.
That same day, the Democrat-majority State Board of Elections rejected the request 3-2 along party lines saying it would “not be practical” to reprint ballots so close to the start of absentee voting because “the time it would take to prepare and print new ballots would leave most North Carolina counties without ballots until mid-September at the earliest and lead to significant additional costs.”
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The next day, Kennedy sued the Board, citing irreparable harm to himself but more realistically to Trump’s North Carolina campaign; prevailing wisdom is that Kennedy would draw more votes away from Trump here than from Vice President Kamala Harris.
Kennedy’s machinations show just how important, and how tight, the North Carolina race is for both Democrats and Republicans. Polls suggest a dead heat within the margin of error, and Trump only won North Carolina by a margin of 1.3% in 2020.
A week after the North Carolina ballot fight began and just hours before ballots were set to be mailed out, Wake County Republican Judge Rebecca W. Holt agreed with Democrats on the State Board of Elections and rejected Kennedy’s suit with a scathing opinion, saying Kennedy would incur “no practical, personal or pecuniary harm” by remaining on the ballot he’d fought so hard to get on in the first place.
“… State law requires those ballots to be distributed, beginning 60 days prior to a statewide general election … this year, that date is Friday, September 6 … starting afresh with ballot preparation, moreover, would require the state to violate the statutory deadline for distributing ballots … removing plaintiff from the ballot and re-printing the ballots will necessarily mean that voters have at least two fewer weeks in which to vote,” the opinion read.
Holt did, however, pause the distribution of absentee ballots until noon on Sept. 6 to give Kennedy’s attorneys a chance to file an appeal, which they did. The appeals court sided with Kennedy, and the State Board of Elections appealed to the state Supreme Court.
On Sept. 9, North Carolina’s Supreme Court, led by a 5-2 Republican majority, ignored state law, put the state in jeopardy of violating federal law and sided with Kennedy largely along partisan lines, 4-3.
Writing for the majority, Associate Justice Trey Allen said that the trial court erred by focusing too much on the “minimal harm” to Kennedy and that the possibility of disenfranchising voters “who mistakenly believe that [Kennedy] remains a candidate for office” outweighed the harm to voters who would be disenfranchised by two fewer weeks of absentee voting — a critical period that could lead to some of their ballots arriving late and thus being rejected.
Associate Justice Phil Berger, Jr., son of North Carolina Senate President Pro Temp Phil Berger, concurred with the majority but acknowledged the ruling could create real problems with election administration.
“There are now hundreds of thousands of invalid ballots in existence, if not more,” Berger, Jr. wrote. “Thus, there is the potential, however slight, that North Carolina voters could acquire both versions of seemingly legitimate ballots during the 2024 election.”
Republican Associate Justice Richard Deitz joined the Court’s Democrats, Anita Earls and Allison Riggs, in dissent. Deitz opined that the majority’s “thoughtful analysis” was “entirely reasonable,” but suggested that the majority was legislating from the bench — a claim conservatives often use against liberals, not other conservatives.
“Still, I believe this Court’s role is to follow the law as written,” he penned.
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All this came after a protracted fight by Kennedy to get on North Carolina’s ballots. Earlier this year Kennedy said he had enough signatures to qualify for ballot access; however, independent candidates face a higher bar (more than 83,000 petition signatures) than candidates from established parties (around 14,000), so Kennedy and his allies created one.
According to State Board of Elections records, the We the People party wasn’t formally recognized until a 4-1 vote by the State Board of Elections on July 16. The party submitted 24,509 signatures, with 18,569 of them deemed valid.
Voting equipment stands at the ready at the Haywood County Board of Elections office. Cory Vaillancourt photo
The North Carolina Democratic Party suddenly focused intense scrutiny on its miniscule new adversary, alleging in court on July 25 that Kennedy used the party to skirt signature requirements because he’d announced his intent to run for president as an independent many times.
Backed by the Republican National Committee, the North Carolina Republican Party also took interest in the situation and filed an amicus brief on behalf of the former Democrat, who at the time was still a self-proclaimed independent and hadn’t yet endorsed Trump.
On Aug. 12, Wake County Judge Keith Gregory, a Democrat, rejected the emergency preliminary injunction requested by the Democrats to keep We the People off the ballot.
The political intrigues, shifting alliances and abrupt turnabouts — it was less than two weeks after Gregory’s ruling that Kennedy began clamoring to get off the ballot — leave behind a mess that will shortchange North Carolina’s voters more than it will Harris, Kennedy or Trump. The problems start with the shortened timeframe in which election administrators have to perform their duties.
“Right now, it’s lack of staffing,” said Robert Inman, director of the Haywood County Board of Elections. “We’re fully staffed, but there’s only four people here who are going to do the exact same amount of work in a very limited, condensed period of time. There’s only so much time, so many hours left on the calendar. That’s the primary challenge right now.”
Right off the bat, Inman and his staff have already been tasked with an unusual duty; he said that before the state’s Sept. 6 deadline, he and his staff had had processed and packaged the ballots to fulfill requests made by application, but after the court’s ruling removing Kennedy from the ballots, they had to sequester the faulty ballots — locked away, to prevent the kind of pilferage Berger warned about — until they can be destroyed on-site by a commercial shredding service.
None, Inman said, were mailed out, in accordance with State Board of Elections guidance and the Sept. 5 court ruling.
That batch of ballots, soon to become a large mass of small, indecipherable scraps of paper, cost Haywood County taxpayers roughly $20,000, according to Inman.
The next batch will cost far more, because the printer that supplies 94 North Carolina counties with ballots has been inundated with 94 new printing jobs that all need to be completed in short order. Inman said he thinks he has contingency funds to cover the cost, but he may have to shuffle his budget around and may have to approach county commissioners to replenish those funds later.
Then, there’s the Sept. 21 federal deadline that the printer is adding staff to meet so that Inman and 99 others like him can begin to distribute the new ballots, sans Kennedy.
“We’re hopeful that we receive the ballots and are able to repackage them and get them into the postal stream before Sept. 21,” Inman said. The State Board of Elections has requested an extension of the deadline, but even if it’s granted, that still means fewer days for voters to receive, complete and return their ballots.
Voters who have requested absentee ballots won’t have to submit an additional request to receive a ballot, but Inman has another concern.
“There are folks who requested it that are traveling. They move around constantly with their lives and their line of work, and they may not be in the same place, at the same physical address, that they had requested that ballot to be,” he said.
That could lead to someone, perhaps departing on a business trip out of state or overseas, or moving to a new town within North Carolina or to a new state, missing their ballot entirely.
Inman, however, remains confident that all election outcomes reported by Haywood County’s Board of Elections will be accurate, complete and fair.
“We all know that there are some people, because we hear it every day, who are always suggesting that there’s some inaccuracy, and of course, I don’t believe any of that to be true at all,” he said. “Certainly, we have ways to determine if there are inaccuracies, and we have ways that most everything will reveal itself eventually. If there is something that requires further research, we have time to do that [before the canvass]. We have always had an accurate count, a tabulation at the end of our process.”
