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After a “presidential” campaign that made him a national joke, what with the brain worm, the freakish dead bear story, and his chainsaw-wielding take on Herman Melville, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. got the fuck out of the 2024 presidential race so he could endorse a far bigger brain worm, and you might have thought that was that. But after dropping out, Kennedy tried to get himself removed from the ballot in several swing states where his presence might draw voters away from the Orange Whale.
He was able to get his name removed from ballots in a number of states, including swing states Arizona, Georgia, and Pennsylvania, but he’s still on the ballot in Michigan and Wisconsin. And as we noted earlier this week, Kennedy also managed to get the North Carolina state supreme court to remove him, overruling a lower court’s ruling despite a state law requiring absentee ballots be mailed out by September 6. That means the state has to destroy and reprint ballots, which we noted would cost a million bucks and “might create chaos.”
Gentle Readers, in that piece we didn’t really look too closely at exactly what that chaos might look like, but Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern explained it in detail in a column yesterday, and good Crom, it’s so much worse than “might create chaos” is able to express.
As Stern explains, we aren’t just talking about an inconvenience here. The North Carolina Supremes’ 4-3 decision, he says,
will compel election administrators to destroy nearly 3 million already-printed ballots that featured Kennedy’s name and redesign 2,348 different ballot styles across the state to accommodate the eleventh-hour change. This complex process will significantly delay the distribution of new ballots—which will, in turn, unlawfully abridge early voting for everyone while jeopardizing the voting rights of service members overseas in clear contradiction of federal statute.
Kennedy had already been informed by North Carolina elections officials that the deadline for switching candidates around was August 22. He dropped out and endorsed Trump the next day, but then he didn’t actually file to have his name taken off the ballot until August 27, well past the deadline.
By that point, county election boards were already printing ballots. Under state law, the board of elections may refuse a “late” request to remove a candidate from the ballot when removal is no longer “practical.” Another state law compels election officials to mail ballots to service members and others living overseas by Sept. 6.
The state Supremes then tossed a great big stinkbomb into the election plans that were already running forward smoothly, because what the hell, wouldn’t want to miss an opportunity to tilt the election toward Trump; this is the same state supreme court that, almost immediately after gaining a Republican majority, arbitrarily brought back the very same racist gerrymander that the previous court determined violated the state constitution, simply because it could. Nothing about the law or the map had changed, but the balance on the court had, so goodbye fair voting.
Again, this is a completely lawless decision, running roughshod over not only the state law requiring overseas absentee ballots be mailed by September 6, but also illegally shortening the early voting period — when Democrats are more likely to vote than Republicans, not incidentally.
Worse, the decision now puts North Carolina on track to violate federal law, since states must send out overseas ballots no later than September 21. The state elections director testified that it could take 18 to 23 days to print new ballots, which makes meeting that federal requirement extremely unlikely.
Bizarrely, Republican Justice Trey Allen claimed in his opinion that by following state law and printing ballots, elections officials had illegally discriminated against Kennedy by making it harder from him to leave the ballot he had worked to get himself onto. Apparently the state should have anticipated he wouldn’t even ask to be removed until five days after the goddamned deadline.
It’s a partisan hack job that violates state law under the pretense of making sure that voters have “accurate information regarding the candidates,” or at least one of them, at the trivial cost of cutting short absentee and early voting for every voter in the state, and imperiling the right of military and civilian voters overseas to have their votes counted at all.
But it could help Trump now that Kamala Harris is in danger of winning, so that’s worth it, in the new judicial logic where the law is anything that helps your friends and hurts your enemies. As Justice Allison Riggs wrote in her dissent, “The whims of one man have been elevated above the constitutional interests of tens of thousands of North Carolina voters.”
Well yeah. If you want to change it, maybe you should get more Democrats elected to the state’s highest court. If it lets them vote at all.
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