RALEIGH, N.C. (WNCN/AP) — Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has endorsed former Republican President Donald Trump, while also suspending his own presidential campaign — and is trying to have his name removed from battleground state ballots.
Kennedy sued the North Carolina State Board of Elections in Wake Superior Court on Friday to have his name removed from ballots.
On Thursday, North Carolina’s elections board refused to take him off the state’s ballot, with a majority saying it was too late in the process for him to withdraw.
In North Carolina, the elections board’s three Democrats outvoted two Republicans to reject a request made by the recently certified We The People party of North Carolina to remove Kennedy and his running mate, Nicole Shanahan, from the party’s ballot line.
State board officials said that they had previously received a request signed by Kennedy to withdraw, but since he was the nominee of the party, it was the job of We The People to formally seek the removal.
The Democratic majority said making the change would be impractical, given that state law directs the first absentee ballots for the Nov. 5 elections be mailed to requesters starting Sept. 6. North Carolina is the first state in the nation to send fall election ballots.
By late Thursday, 67 of the state’s 100 counties will have received their printed absentee-by-mail ballots, board Executive Director Karen Brinson Bell said. The chief printing vendor for the majority of the state’s counties has printed over 1.7 million ballots. Ballot replacement and mail processing would take roughly two weeks, and the reprinting would cost counties using this vendor alone several hundred thousand dollars combined, she added.
“When we talk about the printing a ballot we are not talking about … pressing ‘copy’ on a Xerox machine. This is a much more complex and layered process,” Brinson Bell told the board.
The two Republican board members suggested the state could have generated new ballots.
“I think we’ve got the time and the means to remove these candidates from the ballot if we exercise our discretion to do so,” Republican member Kevin Lewis said.
Kennedy’s lawsuit, which seeks emergency relief, said that the board of elections admitted it was aware of at least Kennedy’s desire to remove himself from the ballot since Aug. 23.
“Nevertheless, NCSBE directed its County Boards of Election to continue printing ballots with Kennedy on them,” the lawsuit said. “Thus, to the extent NCSBE claims it is ‘impractical’
to remove him from the ballot, it is an issue of NCSBE’s own making.”
Board Chair Alan Hirsch, a Democrat, called the decision not to remove Kennedy “the fairest outcome under these circumstances.”
The state Democratic Party unsuccessfully fought We The People’s certification request before the board and later in state court.
