RFK Jr. off the ballot in New York, stays on it in Wisconsin

The effort by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to siphon votes from Vice President Kamala Harris and boost them for former President Donald Trump hit a couple of snags on Friday.

Since Kennedy, a nearly lifelong Democrat, said in August he will mostly suspend his independent bid for president and endorse Trump, he has been trying to get his name on ballots in New York and off of ballots in swing states, including Wisconsin.

Even though Kennedy has gathered over 100,000 signatures, per Politico, the U.S. Supreme Court sided with Democratic operatives who claimed he fudged his residency on the petition New Yorkers signed onto.

Kennedy used a New York address where he rents a room but the lower court ruled it was not a valid residence, given he lives primarily in Los Angeles.

Kennedy’s goal is to collect as many votes as he can so that the party he started, dubbed We the People, will have staying power, though he also does not want to take votes away from Trump in states where Harris may beat him.

Therefore, he successfully removed his name from ballots in Arizona, Nevada, Georgia and North Carolina, but on Friday the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled that his name will remain on the state’s ballot, upholding a lower court’s ruling that candidates should be removed from ballots only if they die.

The unanimous decision from Wisconsin’s Democrat-controlled court comes after more than 418,000 absentee ballots have already been sent to voters, according to the Associated Press. The outlet said that 28,000 of the state’s absentees have already voted.

The legal wrangling in Wisconsin is not insignificant, the AP notes, given that four of the past six presidential elections in that state have been decided by less than 23,000 votes.

Plus, in 2016, Green Party nominee Jill Stein got 31,000 votes in Wisconsin, which was more than Trump’s winning margin of 23,000 votes, causing some Democrats to chastise her for helping Trump win the presidency.