RALEIGH, NC — The North Carolina Board of Elections on Thursday refused to remove Robert F. Kennedy Jr. from the state’s presidential primary, a majority agreed it was too late to accept the withdrawal.
The three Democratic board members on Wednesday rejected a request by the recently certified North Carolina party We The People to remove the environmental activist and his running mate, Nicole Shanahan, from the party’s ballot.
Friday, Kennedy his campaign suspended and supported Republican Donald Trump. He has since sought to remove his name from the ballot in states where the presidential race is expected to be close, including North Carolina. State officials said they had previously received a request from Kennedy to withdraw, but since he was the party’s nominee — rather than an independent candidate — it was up to We The People to formally request the removal.
A majority of state board members agreed that the change would be impractical, since state law requires that first-time mail ballots for the Nov. 5 election be mailed to applicants beginning Sept. 6. North Carolina is the first state in the country to mail ballots for the fall election, said Karen Brinson Bell, the board’s executive director.
By Thursday evening, 67 of the state’s 100 counties will have received their printed mail ballots, Brinson Bell said. The primary printing vendor for most of the state’s counties has printed more than 1.7 million ballots. Replacing ballots and processing them by mail would take about two weeks, and reprinting would cost counties using that vendor alone hundreds of thousands of dollars, she added.
“When we talk about printing a ballot, we’re not talking about … pressing ‘copy’ on a Xerox machine. This is a much more complex and multi-layered process,” Brinson Bell told the board.
The two Republican board members who supported Kennedy’s impeachment proposed giving the state more time and flexibility to generate new ballots.
“I believe we have the time and the resources to remove these candidates from the ballot if we have the authority to do so,” said Republican Party member Kevin Lewis.
State election officials said We The People’s circumstances did not fully fit within North Carolina law, but that there was a rule that allowed the board to determine whether it was practical to reprint the ballots.
Board Chairman Alan Hirsch, a Democrat, called the decision not to fire Kennedy “the fairest outcome under the circumstances.”
Thursday’s action caps a summer in which the administration struggled with Kennedy’s bid to get on the ballot in the nation’s ninth-largest state. We The People collected signatures from registered voters to become an official party that could then nominate Kennedy as its presidential candidate. To qualify as an independent, it needed six times that many signatures.
The state Democratic Party unsuccessfully challenged We The People’s certification request before the council and later in the state courtEven when the board voted 4-1 last month to make We The People an official party, Hirsch called We The People’s effort “a ruse” and suggested it was ripe for a legal challenge.
Democrat Siobhan O’Duffy Millen, the lone member who voted against certification last month, said the revocation request confirms her position that “this whole episode has been a farce, and I feel sorry for anyone who has been misled.”
