Who Is Robert F. Kennedy Jr.?

My VIP for this week is Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nephew of former President John F. Kennedy and the son of once-presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy. Both Kennedy brothers were assassinated. RFK Jr. was a candidate for POTUS but withdrew from the race to throw his support behind former President Donald Trump.

RFK Jr.’s withdrawal from the presidential race is causing more problems than his candidacy. Hans von Spakovsky discussed the RFK Jr. problems in an article published at The Daily Signal.

Early voting is starting in many states, both in-person and through the absentee balloting process, which makes resolving the issue of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. remaining on state ballots an immediate problem.

Wherever practical, election officials have a solemn obligation to their voters to remove a candidate from the ballot when that candidate has dropped out of the race so their votes aren’t inadvertently wasted if they are unaware of that fact.

That is why the refusal of election officials in Michigan and Wisconsin to remove Kennedy from the ballot is so troubling. A state court judge in Michigan also refused to force the secretary of state to remove Kennedy, bizarrely claiming that “elections are not just games” and that the secretary is “not obligated to honor the whims of candidates for public office.”

“Whims”?! Kennedy has ended his candidacy and is no longer running for president. Voters have a right to be fully informed of this when they are voting. That includes not being given the opportunity to waste their ballot by voting for a candidate who remains on the ballot due to the “games” the partisan secretary of state in Michigan is playing, even though that candidate is no longer in the race.

But even in states that claim it is “too late” to remove a candidate from the ballot and that it will be too expensive to redesign and print new ballots, election officials have a duty to inform their voters that a vote for a candidate like Kennedy, whose name remains on the ballot, will be a waste of their valuable franchise. And there is an easy and relatively inexpensive way to do that, which can be accomplished quickly and without any delay.

Von Spakovsky suggested two things that should be done immediately if States refuse to reprint their ballots without Kennedy’s name on them. His first suggestion is a simple but short notice such as the following being enclosed with every absentee ballot: “IMPORTANT NOTICE TO VOTERS: Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is listed on the ballot as a candidate for the office of President of the United States, has dropped out of the race and is no longer a candidate. Due to the late notice of his ending his candidacy, we were unable to prepare new ballots without his name. All voters should be aware that a vote for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will be a vote for a candidate who is no longer running for office.”

Von Spakovsky’s second suggestion is for election officials to “create signs with this very same notification for posting prominently inside every polling location used in a state for both early voting and in-person voting on Election Day. Designing and creating such a sign can be easily and quickly done; and getting copies printed, again, by any commercial concern (or in-house in counties with printing facilities), could obviously be done with almost no delay.

However, the two above suggestions for notifying “absentee voters and preparing signs for in-person voting should be a secondary plan.” The first plan should be to “make every effort to reprint new ballots that correctly list the candidates actually running for office.” Von Spakovsky then gives his reason why officials should take the necessary steps.

Any refusal by election officials to, at a minimum, prepare such notices will be a

violation of their duty as public officials to fairly and honestly administer the upcoming election. Given the ease of this solution, it will be hard to imagine any refusal to implement it that is based on anything other than election officials engaging in partisan misbehavior that is intended to misinform voters and manipulate the results of the presidential election.

Election officials who engage in that type of misconduct are betraying the public trust and should not be in office.

There are reports that RFK Jr. won “historic legal victories” because “appeals courts in Michigan and North Carolina” struck “his name from the presidential ballot,” as he requested.