Robert F Kennedy filed a lawsuit against the North Carolina State Board of Elections to get his name removed from the state’s ballot a week after suspending his third-party presidential campaign and endorsing Republican hopeful President Trump.
According to Fox News, Kennedy had planned to keep his name on the ballot in safe Democratic and Republican states but didn’t want to be a spoiler in the battleground states.
Over the summer, Kennedy sought signatures to get on the North Carolina ballot under his ‘We the People party‘. However, the North Carolina State Board of Elections denied Kennedy’s recent request to have his name removed from the ballot in a 3-2 vote.
The board explained that nearly 2 million ballots have already been printed in 67 of 100 counties and reprinting them would incur significant costs, with the absentee ballot deadline on September 6.
Board Executive Director Karen Brinson Bell commented on the complexity of the ballot printing process and said, “When we talk about printing a ballot, we are not talking about … pressing ‘copy’ on a Xerox machine. This is a much more complex and layered process.”
Kennedy suspended his campaign with the assertion that he could still become president if neither Trump nor Harris reached the requisite 270 electoral votes. He appeared alongside Trump at a rally in Glendale, Arizona, on August 23.
At the rally, Kennedy posed a series of questions to the audience, saying, “Don’t you want a president who’s going to protect America’s freedoms and who is going to protect us against totalitarianism? Don’t you want a safe environment for your children? Don’t you want to know that the food that you’re feeding them is not filled with chemicals that are going to give them cancer and chronic disease? And don’t you want a president that’s going to make America healthy again?”