Summary:
- The Robert Kennedy ballot access debacle badly weakened the State Board of Elections
- Robert Kennedy’s presidential campaign evaded NC state law
- North Carolina’s leaders should enforce state election laws in a non-partisan way
By Jordan Meadows, Staff Writer for The Carolinian
North Carolina’s system for ballot access is broken. Nothing has illustrated this more effectively than the chaotic drama surrounding the independent candidacy of Robert Kennedy, Jr. for President, which recently came to a calamitous end. The spectacle of Kennedy’s short-lived candidacy revealed the extraordinary willingness by right-wing activists to evade, manipulate, and defy North Carolina’s election laws in order to promote Donald Trump, and the weaknesses in the state’s elections administration that allowed them to succeed.
RFK’s spoiler candidacy
Since the very beginning, RFK’s campaign has been overwhelmingly funded by a major backer to Trump. Timothy Mellon, Trump’s top donor in 2020 as well as 2024, contributed over $35 million to the super PACs of both Trump and Kennedy— $20 million going to RFK Jr.’s campaign alone. Indeed, the RFK campaign itself was almost entirely a creation of Trump’s biggest donor. The goal of this largesse was, obviously, to throw the election to Donald Trump by siphoning off votes for Joe Biden.
In North Carolina, the RFK campaign’s strategy depended on evading the clear wording and intent of state election laws to secure a spot on the ballot. Under North Carolina state law, there is a clear and established process for independent candidates to get on the ballot: they must submit a petition with the valid signatures of at least 1.5% of all registered NC voters who voted in the most recent election for Governor. (In 2024, that means 83,188 signatures.) That’s a lot of signatures. Collecting signatures for electoral petitions is hard, expensive and time-consuming work – as it should be, to protect the integrity of our elections.
A far easier route is to be recognized as a new political party, for which applicants must only submit the valid signatures of 0.25% of registered NC voters from the same pool. (In 2024, that meant only 13,865 signatures.) Because the Kennedy campaign was a slipshod operation, they chose to pursue the easier option, launching the “We The People Party” in January. The “We The People Party” was, and remains, an obvious flag of convenience. It never featured any other candidate but Kennedy himself. It has no membership, no donors, no platform – not even a website, unless one counts the Kennedy campaign site itself. It was a transparent tactic to win ballot access by evading the established procedure by an independent candidate.
Naturally, this strategy faced resistance from the North Carolina State Board of Elections. They questioned, reasonably, whether petition signers were aware that the petition aimed to create a new political party, or if their support was solely for RFK Jr.’s candidacy per se. Specifically, board members were concerned about the wording in the scripts used by the “party’s” petition-gatherers that explicitly referred to Kennedy as an “independent.” They also questioned whether registering as a new party was appropriate at all, since Kennedy was clearly pursuing only his singular independent candidacy. Nevertheless, the NCSBE voted 4-1 to certify We the People as a political party anyway.
The winds change
Kennedy’s presidential campaign in North Carolina ended as tumultuously as it began.
After President Biden’s withdrawal from the Democratic nomination and Vice President Kamala Harris’s resulting surge in the polls, support for Kennedy dropped dramatically. The August edition of the Carolina Forward Poll showed a significant drop in Kennedy’s support in North Carolina, falling 9 points compared to his figures in May. This was reflective of polling from around the country that found that, unlike against Biden, with a Harris candidacy, Kennedy was actually drawing disproportionately more support from Trump.
Thus it was that on August 23, Kennedy announced the suspension of his presidential campaign, indicating his desire to remove his name from ballots in battleground states. However, he did not specify which states he was referring to, and nor did he outline the planned procedures to remove his name. He did, however, explicitly clarify that his motivation was solely to prevent Democrats from winning.
The sudden announcement immediately triggered chaos for the NC SBE as 67 of North Carolina’s 100 counties had already received their absentee mail-in ballots, raising logistical and financial challenges. State law required the first absentee ballots to be mailed or transmitted no later than 60 days before the general election – on September 6. Thus, the SBE rightly denied Kennedy’s request to be removed from the ballot. (Incredibly, Kennedy was suing to be added to the ballot in New York state at the very same time.)
Another round of legal challenges culminated with the Republican majority of the North Carolina Supreme Court ruling that Kennedy must be removed from the state’s ballot, even though the practicalities of doing so – destroying almost 3 million ballots that had already been printed, delaying the legally required deadline for sending out ballots, and risking non-compliance with federal law – were, and remain, enormous.
A loss for the rule of law
From beginning to end, the sordid affair of the Kennedy campaign in North Carolina revealed just how weak the rule of law has become in our state, compared to the raw exercise of partisan political power.
Robert Kennedy Jr. was allowed, in multiple instances, to evade, ignore and manipulate North Carolina state law, and was permitted to do so by Republican political actors – specifically judges – seeking to give Donald Trump an electoral boost. The laws of the State of North Carolina had very little impact on what the Kennedy campaign did; only the whims of opinion polling made a difference. That is not a sound system of election administration. While the NC State Board of Elections generally made the correct calls under the law, our state’s politicized judicial system failed to uphold the supremacy of those laws, and opted instead for their own circumstantial partisan interest.
We don’t know yet who will win in November. But at least in this case, the people of North Carolina lost.
