By Craig Mauger
The Detroit News
(The Detroit News) — A U.S. Court of Appeals panel rejected Friday former independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s attempt to get his name removed from Michigan ballots.
The three-judge panel in the 6th Circuit issued a 2-1 opinion in favor of Democratic Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson’s office a day after absentee ballots became available across the state of Michigan. Already, the Michigan Supreme Court and a federal district court judge had arrived at similar decisions.
Changing the ballot at “this late a date,” 39 days before the Nov. 5 presidential election, would be disruptive, wrote Judge Eric Lee Clay, who penned the majority appeals court opinion.
“Plaintiff does not explain how to unring the bell at this juncture without great harm to voting rights and the public’s interest in fair and efficient election administration,” Clay added of Kennedy.
Kennedy was campaigning in Michigan on Friday with Republican nominee Donald Trump. Kennedy, an environmental lawyer and the nephew of slain President John F. Kennedy, had suspended his own presidential campaign and endorsed Trump on Aug. 23.
During an event in Bath Township Thursday night, Kennedy acknowledged that his name would appear on the ballot in Michigan, seeming to admit he had lost his ongoing court fight.
“My name is going to be on the ballot,” Kennedy said during the Thursday town hall. “But I am asking people not to check my name, but to check Donald Trump’s name because that’s the only way I am going to get to Washington.”
Clay was a nominee of Democratic former President Bill Clinton. Judge Rachel Bloomekatz, a nominee of Democratic President Joe Biden, signed on to the majority opinion.
Judge David McKeague, a nominee of Republican former President George W. Bush, wrote a dissenting opinion, contending that Benson’s actions amounted to an “attempt by a state election official to influence the upcoming presidential election by manipulating state election procedure.”
“Secretary Benson’s decision to add Kennedy to the ballot was arbitrary,” McKeague wrote. “It was unchecked. It conveys a message that Kennedy does not wish to send. And it will cause voters to waste their fundamental right to vote.”
The Natural Law Party nominated Kennedy for president in Michigan in April.
At the time, Doug Dern, chairman of the Natural Law Party in Michigan, said he had met with Kennedy and determined that Kennedy was exactly what the party was looking for in a presidential candidate.
However, four months later in August, Kennedy announced he was suspending his campaign and endorsing Republican Donald Trump, setting off the legal fight over whether his name should remain on ballots in battleground states.
Benson has contended that there was no legal standard in Michigan for removing a minor party candidate once they were nominated. The candidate “bears the flag of their party, and their interests as a candidate are no longer exclusively their own,” Benson’s lawyers wrote Wednesday.
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