NC court will hear RFK Jr's request to get off the ballot, with just 1 day left to decide

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will get his day in court to try getting off the ballot in North Carolina — an extraordinary swing in events following the third-party presidential candidate's other court battle, not even a month ago, to be allowed onto the ballot.

A Wake County judge will hear Kennedy's arguments for being allowed off the ballot on Thursday. It's a last-minute hearing with a quick decision needed: Unless the judge rules otherwise, the state will begin shipping out mail-in ballots Friday to voters.

Kennedy spent months fighting to get on the ballot in North Carolina as a candidate of the newly formed We The People Party, even winning a lawsuit in mid-August from the Democratic Party that sought to force him off the ballot. Democratic leaders feared he would harm Vice President Kamala Harris' chances of winning North Carolina.

But then polling began to show Kennedy's campaign was actually taking more voters from Republican former President Donald Trump than from Harris. Kennedy dropped out of the presidential race and endorsed Trump. Days later, he began trying to get his name taken off the ballot in key swing states including North Carolina. But state elections officials had already started printing ballots by the time Kennedy asked to get off the ballot, they said, and so they denied his request as having come in too late.

The vote was 3-2 along party lines, with the board's three Democratic members choosing to keep Kennedy on the ballot over the objections of the two Republican members.

Kennedy's lawsuit, which will be heard Thursday, argues that the elections board had no set deadline for him to miss, and that therefore a judge should force the state not to send out the ballots to voters around the state on Friday — but rather to reprint the millions of ballots, starting from scratch, a process that could take days while also stretching the budget of the already-underfunded elections board. The State Board of Elections argued it simply wouldn't be practical to reprint the ballots without running afoul of laws requiring mail-in ballots to start going out, but Kennedy counters that that's not his problem.

Elections officials "have no compelling reason to justify forcing Kennedy to stay on the ballot," the lawsuit says. "To the extent their 'practicality' test is grounded in the cost and time needed to print correct ballots, this is an issue of Defendants’ own making."

But one of the board's Democratic members, Siobhan Millen, noted how hard Kennedy fought to get on the ballot in North Carolina — she was originally the lone vote for refusing him ballot access in the first place — before now trying to force the state to print new ballots, especially since the law requires mail-in ballots to go out on Friday.

"It takes a lot of chutzpah ... to request the extraordinary relief of reprinting ballots," she said last week when she and the other Democrats on the board voted to keep Kennedy on the ballot. "The statutory deadline of September 6th can't be ignored just because of the capricious behavior of one party's candidate."

Kennedy is represented in court by multiple lawyers including prominent Republican political attorney Phil Strach, whose wife Kim Strach used to run the North Carolina State Board of Elections. His lawsuit says the current state elections board is going to harm voters, if it goes through with asking North Carolinians to vote using ballots that are no longer accurate for having Kennedy's name listed.

"Public interest favors granting injunctive relief because of the undeniable interest in avoiding ballot confusion, as well as having a free and fair ballot where each qualified
voter and their vote is counted equally," a legal filing on Thursday states. "By forcing Kennedy to remain on the ballot despite his withdrawal from the contest over a week ago, Defendants are bringing those foundational principles into jeopardy."

The lawsuit is so new that the state has not yet had time to file a formal response in court; Thursday's hearing may be their first official answer to the claims.

The two Kennedy lawsuits over whether he should or shouldn't be on the ballot are far from the only political lawsuits dealing with this year's elections. Progressive activist Cornel West also won a lawsuit to get on the ballot earlier this year. Liberal-leaning groups have sued over rules for voter ID and same-day registration. The Republican Party has sued seeking to revoke the voter registrations of 225,000 North Carolina voters, claiming there's not sufficient proof they are who they say they are — a claim the state denies.

Billionaire who helped RFK Jr. get on NC ballot won't back his new effort to get off the ballot