We are not fans of restrictive ballot access, believing that candidates with even a modicum of legitimate support should be able to compete for votes. Throwing people off the ballot based on obscure technicalities that New York used to specialize in, like using the wrong color of paper, is dirty pool deployed by party machines to squash insurgents.
That is not the situation with independent presidential contender Robert F. Kennedy, a former New Yorker who moved to Los Angeles years ago and now is falsely claiming his actual residence is in a friend’s home in Katonah, in northern Westchester.
Sorry, Bobby, no dice on that one and yesterday Albany state Supreme Court Justice Christina Ryba was wise to agree, rejecting his false assertions and removing him from the ballot.
When RFK Jr. filed his candidacy forms with the Federal Election Commission, as Kamala Harris and Donald Trump also did, he gave his real L.A. address on his documents.
But when he submitted his signatures to put his slate of electors on the New York ballot this fall, he used Katonah. And he doesn’t live in Katonah.
According to testimony from the trial held last week before Ryba, Kennedy has slept in the Katonah home once in the last decade. Some home.
Ryba was right to bounce him and his electors from the ballot.
Under the standard most recently set down by the state Court of Appeals, New York’s highest court, in the 2001 case of John O’Hara, state Election Law defines residence as “that place where a person maintains a fixed, permanent and principal home and to which he, wherever temporarily located, always intends to return.”
An unslept-on couch in a spare room in Katonah is not fixed, it is not permanent, it is not principal and Kennedy has no intention to live out his life on that couch.
The pro-Democratic ticket lawyers who brought the lawsuit got it wrong in saying in their complaint that, “the Constitution provides that when a Presidential Candidate and Vice Presidential Candidate on the same ticket are residents of the same State, the ticket is not eligible for any of that State’s Electoral College votes. Here, both Respondent-Candidate Kennedy and his Vice Presidential pick are residents of California, placing California’s 54 Electoral College votes — the largest number of any State — out of their reach.”
That is incorrect. The 12th Amendment, ratified in 1804 says that “The Electors shall meet in their respective states and vote by ballot for President and Vice-President, one of whom, at least, shall not be an inhabitant of the same state with themselves.”
So if RFK Jr. wins the California popular vote, an impossibility over both Harris and Trump, his slate of 54 California’s electors can vote for him, but not his running mate, Nicole Shanahan. If no VP candidate gets an Electoral College majority, the Senate picks the winner.
But that assumes that RFK Jr. and Shanahan are on the California ballot. If RFK Jr. used the Katonah address when seeking a ballot spot in other states, he filed a false instrument, as a New York judge has ruled Katonah is not his address. So should Ryba’s ruling be upheld, as we expect it will be, officials in 49 other states and D.C. should boot RFK from their ballots as well. Which would be a very good outcome.