Long before you mark your ballot, Democrats are scheming to limit your candidate choices by booting competitors off the ballot.
That is what Democrats are trying to do to presidential candidates Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a former Democrat, Jill Stein of the Green Party, and Cornel West, a former Green Party candidate. All are collecting signatures and trying to get on the presidential ballot in each state; Democrats are fighting them on technicalities.
After all, they can’t let voters decide; these candidates are likely to pull votes away from the Democrat ticket.
Instead of campaigning in front of voters, Kennedy and West spend a lot of time and money traveling to courthouses around the country defending against an onslaught of legal cases that could prevent voters from ever having them as a ballot choice.
“They’re suing me all over the country. They’re trying to keep me off the ballot,” Kennedy said in a social media post Tuesday, while standing in front of a courthouse in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Kennedy left the campaign trail for a court hearing challenging his spot on the ballot, but his plane was delayed and he arrived two hours late. Commonwealth Court Judge Lori Dumas would not allow him to testify.
“Unfortunately, in some of these states we’re running into judges who are highly politicized and … are very, very sympathetic to the DNC,” Kennedy said.
Dumas, a connected Philadelphia Democrat, was elected to the seat in 2022.
Kennedy is being sued in Pennsylvania by seemingly average Pennsylvania citizens Alexander Reber and Janneken Smucker.
The court papers don’t mention that Smucker is a Democrat operative and Reber is the former treasurer of the Pennsylvania Democratic Party, former chair of Planned Parenthood Keystone Board, and former vice chair of the Dauphin County Democratic Committee.
They argue that Kennedy falsely listed his residence as New York. This argument has come up in other states. He has three homes, one in California, Massachusetts, and New York. Kennedy says he votes, pays taxes, and practices law in New York, where he grew up and always returns. He had to choose just one state for residency in every state, and New York made the most sense, he said. He believes he may lose the Pennsylvania case but prevail on appeal in a higher court.
“We will win this, but it’s costing us millions of dollars to defend these cases. Of course, that’s what the Democratic Party wants,” Kennedy said. “It’s an irony to me that the DNC is meeting right now in Chicago … and everybody’s talking about joy and about the need to elect Democrats in order to protect voting rights. And you know, my father and my uncle, the Democratic Party that they were members of was the Democratic Party that was at the forefront of making sure that every American could vote [for] the candidate that they wanted to. But today, the Democratic Party is doing the opposite. It’s disenfranchising millions of Americans.”
Kennedy was challenged in New York over the same residency issue and was recently blocked from the ballot.
“I don’t think my father or my uncle would recognize this Democratic Party,” Kennedy said. “I’m a little disillusioned with the Democratic Party today, but that’s why I decided to run as an independent.”
West too, has faced an uphill climb for ballot access. He has been challenged in Maine, Michigan, and North Carolina. Earlier this month, West prevailed in court after the North Carolina State Board of Elections refused to certify his Justice for All Party’s efforts to get him on the ballot there.
“This ruling … paves the way for future third-party and independent candidates running for office in North Carolina, ensuring that the electoral system is fair and equitable,” the West campaign said in a statement, adding that future campaigns will be able to reference this lawsuit if they run into ballot access challenges.
The Kennedy campaign website says he has qualified for the ballot in 46 states (though he is still awaiting official confirmation from half of those states); West claims to be on the ballot in 9 states (and recently qualified in Maine); and Stein is on the ballot in at least three states (but has access to nearly 20 as the Green Party nominee).
The Democrat move to kick challengers off the ballot is nothing new.
As detailed in The Federalist’s Editor-in-Chief Mollie Hemingway’s book Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections, the Democrat strategy of suppressing competing parties and candidates worked in 2020 to keep the Green Party off the ballot in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
The Democratic National Committee tried to remove the Green Party from the ballot again this year, this time in Wisconsin, but last week the Wisconsin Election Commission dismissed the complaint, keeping the Green Party on the ballot.
Beth Brelje is an elections correspondent for The Federalist. She is an award-winning investigative journalist with decades of media experience.
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