The Supreme Court has rejected a bid by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to be placed on the presidential ballot in New York, rejected.
The Supreme Court announced its one-line ruling on Friday afternoon. As is often the case with rulings on the Supreme Court’s emergency docket, there was no explanation of the court’s rationale and no justice recorded a dissent.
Kennedy’s campaign pressed ahead with a lawsuit to appear on the New York ballot despite his announcement last month that he was suspending his long-awaited presidential bid and endorsing former President Donald Trump.
Kennedy’s campaign collected more than 100,000 signatures to get him on the ballot in the Empire State, but Democrats filed a lawsuit arguing that Kennedy did not actually live at the Katonah, New York, address he provided election officials had submitted.
Kennedy said he started renting a room at a childhood friend’s house in Katonah last year, but the friend’s wife testified he only spent the night there once.
“I am, at my core, a New Yorker,” Kennedy said in a lawsuit last month.
New York courts ordered Kennedy removed from the ballot, and his efforts to overturn those rulings were successfully rejected in a federal district judge and at the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals before he went before the nation’s highest court on Friday appeared.
Reached by phone shortly after the ruling, Kennedy said: “I don’t think I have any comment on it. We are looking at our options.”
Kennedy’s attempt to remain on the ballot in New York struck many observers as bizarre because, in the wake of his support for Trump, Kennedy sought to remove his name from the ballots in battleground states where his presence would have an impact could be on the confrontation between Trump and the Democratic presidential candidate. candidate, Vice President Kamala Harris. In recent weeks, Kennedy’s name has been removed from ballots in Arizona, Nevada, Georgia and North Carolina.
A lawyer for Kennedy’s moribund campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the Supreme Court’s action, but in court filings, Kennedy’s legal team complained about New York’s notoriously onerous voting requirements for third-party candidates and said Kennedy’s absence from this presidential election years in violation of the rights of the voters who signed his petitions.
“Those voters have a constitutional right to put Kennedy on the ballot — and vote for him, whether he campaigns for their vote or not,” Kennedy campaign attorneys wrote in the emergency filing filed last week. court filed.
Kennedy, a cousin of President John F. Kennedy Jr. and a son of Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, entered the presidential race last year as a candidate for the Democratic nomination, but announced last October that he was parting ways with the Democrats and mounting an independent campaign for the White House.
