A super PAC backing Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign is seeking to block Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s ballot access in Pennsylvania, a key battleground state, arguing Kennedy’s campaign violates petition-collecting laws in the state.
Clear Choice PAC, a group of Democrats combating ballot access for third parties, is supporting a challenge filed on Thursday by two voters asking a Pennsylvania judge to reject Kennedy’s ballot access, arguing his signatures show “a fundamental disregard of the circulation process and Pennsylvania law.”
The group argues the formatting of the petitions Kennedy submitted to Pennsylvania’s elections office “show a concerted effort to cover up” his petition circulation process and argues there are “numerous” faulty signatures among those submitted by Kennedy.
The group also argues that Kennedy intended to “deceive” Pennsylvania voters by listing a New York address as his residency despite living in Los Angeles. The residency question is also at the heart of Clear Choice’s objection to Kennedy’s ballot access in New York, which is currently being considered by a New York state court.
Kennedy’s campaign submitted signatures for ballot access in June. The deadline for outside groups to file objections to independent candidate petitions was Thursday.
Some background: The objection could trigger a review of the signature threshold for independent presidential candidates seeking to gain ballot access in Pennsylvania. The Pennsylvania Secretary of the Commonwealth’s office has said it will accept nomination petitions containing 5,000 valid signatures in line with a 2018 court ruling on a minor party’s ballot access, despite Pennsylvania’s code of elections stipulating an independent candidate would need 33,043 signatures to qualify for November’s ballot. But the secretary’s office has offered guidance that an objection to an independent candidate’s petition could create an issue that “the state judiciary would need to resolve.”
The court has not yet said whether it would consider the state’s signature threshold for independent candidates.
