WASHINGTON (Reuters) -American Values 2024, a fundraising "Super PAC" supporting third-party presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., said on Tuesday it plans to spend up to $15 million getting him on the ballot in 10 states that will be important to winning the 2024 race.
Also Tuesday, Kennedy's campaign sued the state of Utah, arguing its January 2024 deadline for candidates to submit signatures to appear on November's ballot was unconstitutional. WHY IT'S IMPORTANT
While Kennedy is believed to have cross-party appeal, has raised millions of dollars and is polling at levels not seen by a third-party candidate since the early 1990s, none of it matters if he can't get on state ballots - a cumbersome process deliberately made difficult by the Republican and Democratic parties over the years.
The money and the lawsuit represent two diffent paths Kennedy and other third-party candidates may take to get on state ballots - hiring people to collect signatures and challenging the legality of state requirements. WHAT'S INVOLVED?
AV24, as the Super PAC calls itself, will spend money to collect signatures by hand, as state law requires, in Arizona, California, Colorado, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Nevada, New York, and Texas, which it says represent about half of the signatures nationwide that Kennedy needs to get on the ballot in November.
AV24 was on track to raise nearly $30 million after Kennedy, son of the Democratic senator who was assassinated in 1968, said in October he would run as an independent, AV24 co-founder Tony Lyons told Reuters. Millions have come from a former donor to Donald Trump, Timothy Mellon.
The Utah lawsuit, which was first reported by the Salt Lake Tribune, asks a federal court to block a Jan. 8 deadline to collect 1,000 signatures backing Kennedy's plans to join the ballot, citing the difficulty and expense.
NOTABLE QUOTES
"We have chosen to pursue these critical states, some of them battlegrounds, due to the complexity of the state election codes and the volume of signatures necessary to achieve ballot access," said Deirdre Goldfarb, who advises the Super PAC.
"The current deadline is the earliest deadline ever sought to be imposed on independent presidential candidates" in the modern era, the lawsuit states.