The Michigan Supreme Court ruled Monday that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will remain on the state’s ballot this fall despite the former presidential candidate suspending his campaign and endorsing Republican Donald Trump.
Kennedy, who had been nominated for president by the Natural Law Party in Michigan, wasn’t entitled to the “extraordinary relief” of having the court require his name be removed from the ballot, with less than two months remaining before Election Day, the Supreme Court majority wrote in a brief order.
Kennedy had “neither pointed to any source of law that prescribes and defines a duty to withdraw a candidate’s name from the ballot nor demonstrated his clear legal right to performance of this specific duty,” the court’s majority order said.
Two Republican-nominated justices, David Viviano and Brian Zahra, wrote a dissenting statement. Democrat-nominated justices hold a 4-3 majority on the state’s high court.
In April, Michigan’s Natural Law Party nominated Kennedy, an environmental lawyer and the nephew of slain President John F. Kennedy. 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 candidate.
However, four months later, Kennedy announced he was dropping his campaign and endorsing Republican nominee Donald Trump, setting off the legal fight over whether his name should remain on ballots in battlegrounds states.
Michigan Court of Claims Judge Christopher Yates ruled on Sept. 3 that Kennedy couldn’t withdraw from Michigan’s ballot. Yates determined the Secretary of State’s office wasn’t “obligated to honor the whims of candidates for public office.”
Then, on Friday, the Michigan Court of Appeals reversed Yates’ decision. The appeals court said the state law the Secretary of State’s office had said bars candidates nominated through a party convention from withdrawing from the ballot only applied to those seeking “state offices.”
“And without that restriction, defendant had no basis to deny plaintiff’s request to withdraw his name from the ballot,” the three-judge Court of Appeals panel determined.
The Secretary of State Jocelyn Benon’s office appealed that decision to the Michigan Supreme Court on Friday, the deadline, under state law, for the office to send notices to county clerks about the candidates seeking offices in the November election.
The office of Benson, a Democrat, has cited a Sept. 3 letter from Dern, who is opposing Kennedy’s removal from the ballot. Minor parties need one of their candidates to get 1% of what the winning secretary of state candidate got to keep their automatic ballot access: about 24,700 votes.
If Kennedy were left off the ballot, the Natural Law Party would “be greatly harmed if not destroyed,” Dern wrote in his letter.
“This is an important election and Mr. Kennedy has changed his mind for what appears to be either personal gain or to influence the presidential election,” Dern wrote.
___
© 2024 www.detroitnews.com
Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
