Nominating petitions to place independent presidential candidates Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Dr. Cornel West on the Maine ballot are currently facing challenges, with hearings scheduled for both candidates this Wednesday.
According to the Maine Press Herald, the challenges aim to prevent both candidates from appearing on the state ballot, alleging they failed to gather enough valid signatures to qualify. The hearings are set for Wednesday, August 14, with Kennedy’s scheduled in the morning and West’s in the afternoon. To qualify for the Maine ballot as independent candidates, Kennedy’s and West’s campaigns needed to collect 4,000 valid signatures by the August 1 deadline. Both campaigns submitted enough raw signatures by the deadline.
The West campaign responded to the challenge in a press release on Monday, stating that the campaign submitted 4,978 signatures after a “meticulous verification process that included a line-by-line assessment of each signature, ensuring all legal standards were met.” The campaign dismissed the challenge as “baseless” and “driven by partisan interests aiming to restrict voter choice.”
The Kennedy campaign has not yet responded at this time.
The Herald also reports that the challenges appear to be associated with Clear Choice Action, a Democratic Party-aligned super PAC created to target third-party and independent candidates ahead of the presidential election. This same super PAC was responsible for a lawsuit in New York that led to Kennedy’s disqualification from that state’s ballot earlier this week.
https://ballot-access.org/2024/08/13/challenger-to-maine-petition-for-robert-f-kennedy-jr-is-withdrawn/
Imagine creating a SPAC just for filing frivolous lawsuits to try and deny voters options. Imagine ruling in favor of that SPAC because they are filing frivolous lawsuits on behalf of your party. And imagine refusing to even let the defendant make any argument with reference to the constitution.
The correct response to such systematic frivolous litigation, is to remove the SPAC’s party from the ballot for that election in that state. And the correct response to such gross partisan abuse of authority, miscarriage of justice and corruption, is to defrock the supreme court injustice, throw them in prison for as many years as they have heard cases – without possibility of parole, naturally – and donate their entire pension and benefits to the campaign of the candidate they were conspiring to screw over.