Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is not actively running for president. But you wouldn’t know it if you follow the New York courts.
Despite suspending his presidential campaign last week, Kennedy continues to wage an expensive and multi-faceted legal fight to keep his name on the presidential ballot in the state he called home for decades. His ongoing pursuit has confounded some onlookers, particularly as he seeks to remove his name from the ballot in a number of key battleground states.
The former candidate’s attorney says Kennedy — who has endorsed former President Donald Trump, the Republican nominee — is simply looking to bring fairness to New York’s rules for getting on the ballot, which he argues are unconstitutional.
But Kennedy may have some personal stake in the case, too.
The New York state Appellate Division ruled 4-0 against Kennedy on Thursday, upholding a lower court’s decision that he didn’t live at the Westchester County address listed on his ballot petitions. At trial, Kennedy testified that he sought to keep New York as his official residence in part because he wanted to maintain ties to the state should he decide to run for office there someday.
“I moved to California, but in the back of my mind, I thought one day I might run for state office in New York or maybe one of my kids would,” Kennedy said at trial. He maintained that he and his wife Cheryl Hines have always intended to move back to New York after she retires from acting.
To run for governor or attorney general in New York, a candidate must have been a resident of the state for the five years preceding Election Day. The rule is more relaxed to run for U.S. Senate or the House of Representatives; a candidate only has to be a resident of the state they represent when they’re elected.
Pete Kavanaugh, a longtime Democratic strategist who founded the group Clear Choice, which is funding a lawsuit to knock Kennedy off the ballot, said the former candidate’s claim was “irrelevant” to the court case.
But he and his organization point to another possible reason for RFK Jr.’s continued interest in proving his residence. In arguments before the Appellate Division earlier this week, attorney John Quinn — also working with Clear Choice — said Kennedy’s testimony shows he has a “voter fraud problem, too.”
“It became clear at trial that his sister sold a residence that she lived in in 2015, and he continued to use that residence so that he could vote in New York while living in California,” Quinn said. “He was committing abject voter fraud.”
Kennedy’s attorney Jim Walden disputed that claim outright, calling it “offensive” and “unfounded.”
“It shows how these [Democratic National Committee] proxies will grasp at any straw to try to maintain the majority-party monopoly over the presidential ballot in New York, leaving it the most anti-democratic state in the union,” he said.
The legal wrangling over Kennedy’s ballot status in New York has by now stretched on for months — outliving even his presidential campaign.
He can try to take his case to the Court of Appeals, though there’s no guarantee the state’s highest court will agree to hear the case. But he’s already turned to the federal courts, where last week his campaign amended a previous lawsuit in an attempt to throw out the New York rule requiring independent candidates to list their home address at all.
In the federal lawsuit, the Kennedy campaign claims the New York requirement is “discriminatory” because it only applies to independent candidates, while major party nominees don’t have to petition or submit their home address. He’s also trying to invalidate other ballot-access rules that are the subject of a separate, similar case on Long Island.
In a statement, Walden said the campaign looks forward to “taking our case to the Court of Appeals and the federal court so that New York is not the only state in the nation where the majority parties have a monopoly on the ballot.”