Robert F. Kennedy Jr.‘s first response to this week’s debate agreement between President Joe Bidenformer President Donald Trump and CNN was to accuse them of ‘conspiring’ against him. But within hours, the independent presidential candidate changed his tune: He would try to win a month-long sprint to meet CNN’s criteria and crash the stage.
The question is whether both Kennedy’s voting machine and the state government offices that will process his petition signatures will be able to act quickly enough to get him on enough state ballots by mid-June to meet the debate criteria — and what exactly the demands of the cable network. criteria, which have been used for decades for presidential debates in the fall, in a different context mean the start of summer.
Kennedy’s campaign has long sought to qualify in all 50 states before Election Day, but the debate accelerated his timeline because one of the criteria for eligibility is having a sufficient number of state votes to pass the 270-vote electoral threshold achieve to win. the Presidency before the deadline for participation” a week before the debate.
Kennedy’s campaign said the candidate and his team had a phone call with CNN on Friday afternoon about the June 27 debate in Atlanta. The campaign did not answer additional questions Friday about what happened on that call. But in the meantime, she is continuing her plans to qualify for the general election, with petition signatures being collected and submitted earlier than initially expected.
A new injection of money supports the efforts. Nicole Shanahan, Kennedy’s running mate, announced Wednesday at a campaign event in Nashville that she would donate an additional $8 million to the campaign, which would cover the voting access budget. As a candidate on the ticket, she can contribute unlimited amounts of her own money to the campaign.
Biden and Trump have already agreed to participate in CNN’s debate, bypassing the traditional Commission on Presidential Debates but using criteria very similar to what the nonpartisan commission has used. One key difference: The committee’s debates always took place in the fall, when general election ballots were ready to go before voters.
This time, Kennedy is still in the middle of his efforts to access ballots, managing state deadlines spread throughout the summer. Even Biden and Trump will not have formally secured their party nominations and voting positions at the conventions on June 27, although both are presumptive nominees after the loosening of the 2024 primaries. Kennedy campaign director Amaryllis Fox Kennedy noted the timing of the convention in a Friday evening post on social media.
Frank Fahrenkopf, co-chair of the Commission on Presidential Debates, said in an interview with Politico on Friday that Kennedy could have grounds to sue CNN over its debate criteria, though he also noted that the commission regularly faced lawsuits from outside candidates over the years, which the candidates regularly lost. The criteria also includes a polling element: at least 15% support in four qualifying national polls, with Kennedy having already reached that goal in two.
That makes access to the ballots a more difficult hurdle for Kennedy. His uphill battle to reach 50 state ballots includes a variety of state deadlines for signature submissions and verification. Although Kennedy’s campaign has trumpeted its signature-gathering efforts in many states, it has been formally approved for the ballot in relatively few states, and an example of different state rules shows why simply speeding up signature gathering may not be enough.
In the crucial swing state of Arizona, for example, the filing deadline for independent candidates to submit petition signatures for ballot access won’t begin until July 28, the secretary of state said. That’s over a month after the presidential debate on CNN.
Other states have similar rules, including New Hampshire, where the campaign can’t submit signatures until early June. It’s unclear how many states have such rules, but even in states that don’t, getting on the ballot is more complicated than just submitting the minimum required number of signatures.
In Texas, Kennedy said Monday, his campaign has collected and submitted enough signatures to qualify for the ballot there. But he hasn’t officially started yet: the Texas secretary of state told NBC News that the signatures are still in the verification process, without estimating how long this will take.
As Kennedy submits signatures to get on state ballots, he can also expect to face potential issues related to those signatures that could delay the official vote. It’s a relatively common process – but the time constraints of the June debate add a new element of urgency. In Michigan, for example, state and national Democratic Party groups on Friday asked election officials to investigate alleged fraudulent signatures on petitions from Republican candidates.
Kennedy is currently on the ballot in six states, including electoral vote-rich California and battleground Michigan, where he was nominated by third-party groups, taking the spot on the ballot from already established parties.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
