Friday was a rough day in the ratfucking mines for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The gangly plague enthusiast saw not one, not two, but three of his legal challenges to his ballot status in New York, Michigan, and Wisconsin rejected by the courts. Score a tiny, tiny victory for the sane among us.
These particular ratfucking efforts required Typhoid Bobby to take two wildly contradictory stances on ballot access for his recently dead presidential campaign. In New York, RFK Jr. had sued to keep his name on the ballot despite his having dropped out of the race. But in Wisconsin and Michigan, the squinty jackass had sued to force his name off the presidential ballot. (This already worked in North Carolina, and it was disgusting.) Did you go cross-eyed reading those sentences? Because we went cross-eyed writing them.
Yes, it is confusing and incredibly stupid. Not that we would expect intellectual consistency from a chemtrails conspiracy theorist who opposes water fluoridation like we’re all still living in 1953 and Uncle Joe’s communist forces are undermining the very fabric of freedom by giving Americans cavities out the wazoo.
First, New York. Kennedy’s name had been taken off the ballot last month after a judge determined that he lied about being a New York resident on his nominating petitions. It turns out the address he used was the home of some random friend in Katonah from whom he rented a room in May, and where he had spent precisely one night since.
Kennedy’s excuse for this deception was that even though he moved to California in 2014 to live with his actress wife, he always intended to come back to New York someday, and isn’t that the same thing as actually living there now, in the present? And besides, he argued, the 100,000 New Yorkers who signed his nominating petition deserved the opportunity to vote for him. Presumably Kennedy didn’t want these grown-ass adults to learn the lesson that sometimes life isn’t fair.
Not-Running-For-President RFK Jr. Demands US Supreme Court Manager Let Him Back *On* New York Ballot
Unfortunately for Typhoid Bobby, every state judge who heard his argument had the same reaction: Are you fucking kidding me? So he tried appealing all the way up to the Supreme Court. On Friday SCOTUS announced it would not take up the case. Since only four justices needed to sign on to take it, we can assume that at least three of the conservatives had a rare moment of sanity.
The dumbest part of this is that New York is no swing state; Kamala Harris is on track to win it easily. All Kennedy could do was narrow her margin, which might appeal to both his and Donald Trump’s ego. Which we suppose is reason enough to tie up the courts with nonsense.
RFK Jr. was taking the complete opposite tack in Michigan, suing to keep his name off the ballot after the state Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson determined too bad, bub, it was stayin’. On Friday a panel from the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that removing Kennedy’s name from the ballot less than six weeks before the election would be too disruptive, what with ballots already being printed up and the absentees mailed out. We guess anyone who might have signed a nominating petition to get RFK Jr. on the Michigan ballot doesn’t deserve the same opportunity to vote for him that New Yorkers do. Strange, that.
Kennedy was campaigning in Michigan on Thursday night, where he seemed to know he was about to lose the case. So he told the crowd to not vote for him:
“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.”
Untrue! He could visit Washington anytime he wants. He’s a Kennedy, he can absolutely afford a hotel room.
It was a similar story in Wisconsin, where on Friday the state supreme court rejected Kennedy’s attempt to get his name off the ballot there. The mechanism by which he wanted his name removed, though, was a little different.
Wisconsin officials, who have already printed ballots and begun mailing them out, say it is far too late to remove Kennedy’s name. But the candidate has proposed a work-around: He argues that county clerks should be required to cut out and place a sticker over his name on each ballot—all 4 million of them.
Good Lord. Imagine the time and effort it would take for county clerks to put stickers on four million ballots. They would need teams of people working around the clock for the next few weeks, which your average underfunded county clerk does not have.
But an even bigger issue was how disruptive a sticker would be to the literal counting process. Read our Liz at Public Notice for are you even kidding me with this?
Election officials and county clerks were floating some dire scenarios. Ballot tabulating machines are calibrated to a ballot’s exact weight, and they might reject ballots weighed down by even an extra fraction of an ounce. Or a machine could interpret the sticker’s presence as some sort of voter error and reject legitimate ballots. Or machines might react differently from each other, which would invalidate some ballots in one jurisdiction and not another. And on and on and on, world without end, amen.
The end result would have been laborious hand counts, which would have slowed down certification, been less accurate, and probably invited a whole bunch of lawsuits from both Democrats and Republicans while Donald Trump screamed “FRAUD” over and over like a tornado warning alarm and the rest of us banged our heads against the wall with ever-increasing force.
In other words, it would have gone exactly as the Republicans want, the ratfuckers.
Kennedy did win one effort a couple of weeks ago in North Carolina, where that state’s insane supreme court ordered clerks to destroy three million ballots and redesign and reprint them without Kennedy’s name. This despite the fact that RFK Jr. filed his appeal to have his name removed five days after the deadline for such requests in August, and clerks across the state warned that the order would mean ballots would not get printed and mailed out in time to meet both state and federal law. Which will make the vote count there chaotic and invite all sorts of other lawsuits down the line. So score one for the ratfuckers there.
So a bad week for Typhoid Bobby legally, but we did find learn the gag-inducing news from the 31-year-old reporter that he has been virtually banging that the 70-year-old has impressive sexual stamina. So, there’s that.
[Detroit News / Slate / AP]
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