Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has gone to the Supreme Court in an effort to be on the presidential ballot in New York, even though he has suspended his independent campaign, announced his support for Republican nominee Donald Trump, and just won an appeal to be off the ballot in battleground North Carolina.
Kennedy has been kept off the ballot in reliably blue New York because he was found to have used a “sham” state address for his nominating petition. The pending application to the justices was brought by Kennedy’s campaign committee, a political action committee supporting him and one of the state voters who signed the petition to have him on the ballot.
In their application, they remind the justices that a suspended campaign is technically different from a terminated campaign, recalling that in the 1992 election, independent candidate Ross Perot suspended his campaign in July and returned in October to win almost 20% of the vote. And the even more fundamental issue, they argue, is the rights of the more than 100,000 voters who signed the invalidated petition to put Kennedy on the ballot. “Those voters have a constitutional right to have Kennedy placed on the ballot — and to vote for him, whether he is campaigning for their vote or not,” they tell the justices.
They add that the validity of the New York address Kennedy used for his nominating petition shouldn’t matter because there isn’t a state residency requirement to run for president, anyway. A New York state judge found last month that the address Kennedy listed “was not Kennedy’s bona fide and legitimate residence, but merely a ‘sham’ address that he assumed for the purpose of maintaining his voter registration and furthering his own political aspirations in this State.”
The Republican majority of North Carolina’s top court ruled earlier this month to keep Kennedy off the ballot there. Dissenting Democratic justices cited his New York litigation as an example of Kennedy fighting to get off the ballot in certain swing states while fighting to be on it in other states.
Kennedy has said he doesn’t want to be a spoiler in battleground states and recently urged people to vote for Trump no matter what state they live in. His pending high court appeal presents the latest opportunity for the justices to weigh in on the 2024 election as November approaches. Their actions have been a mixed bag so far in terms of the potential effect on the election. On Friday, the court declined to put Jill Stein on the ballot in Nevada, where the Green Party candidate could have acted as a spoiler for Democratic nominee Kamala Harris in a battleground state. And last month, the justices partially sided with Republicans’ bid to enforce Arizona state law requiring documentary proof of citizenship for voting. We won’t know how the court will decide Kennedy’s request at least until later this week, with the opposition’s response due Wednesday at 4 pm ET. Subscribe to the Deadline: Legal Newsletter for updates and expert analysis on the top legal stories. The newsletter will return to its regular weekly schedule when the Supreme Court’s next term kicks off in October.
Jordan Rubin is the Deadline: Legal Blog writer. He was a prosecutor for the New York County District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and is the author of “Bizarro," a book about the secret war on synthetic drugs. Before he joined MS NOW, he was a legal reporter for Bloomberg Law.
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