Politics
RFK Jr.’s bid to take himself off swing state ballots may scramble mail-in voting
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will be removed from ballots in Michigan and North Carolina, two key battleground states in the 2024 presidential election, after state appeals courts ruled in his favor on Friday.
The rulings have delayed the mailing of absentee ballots in North Carolina, and it may also affect mail-in voting in Michigan, where the deadline to send out ballots for military and overseas voters is Sept. 21.
The North Carolina appeals court said in a last-minute ruling on Friday that Kennedy’s name should be taken off the state ballot, blocking the state board of elections from distributing absentee ballots on the day it was supposed to begin doing so.
The North Carolina State Board of Elections quickly appealed the ruling to the state Supreme Court but said it would begin coding new ballots without Kennedy’s name. More than 2.9 million ballots had already been printed with the former independent candidate’s name on it, the board said.
Karen Brinson Bell, the executive director of North Carolina’s election board, previously estimated that it could take two weeks to reprint ballots at the cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars, The Associated Press reported.
In Michigan, a state appeals court similarly ruled on Friday that Kennedy’s name should be stricken from the ballot, reversing a lower court’s earlier decision. Hours later, Secretary of State Joyce Benson, a Democrat, asked the Michigan Supreme Court for an emergency decision on the appeals court ruling. Ballots have not been printed in Michigan yet, and Benson has some leeway with the timing of the process given the state’s deadline.
After suspending his presidential campaign and endorsing Donald Trump in late August, Kennedy began the process of removing himself from the ballots in swing states — many of which he fought hard to get on in the first place — to avoid spoiling the vote for the Republican nominee.
With less than two months until Election Day, Kennedy’s ballot efforts have seen mixed results. But his court battles may end up throwing into disarray mail-in voting in several crucial battleground states. He also sued Wisconsin this week to remove his name from the ballot there.
Clarissa-Jan Lim is a breaking/trending news blogger for BLN Digital. She was previously a senior reporter and editor at BuzzFeed News.
The U.S. delegation in Seattle includes HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Energy Secretary Chris Wright, according to a FIFA official, along with White House FIFA World Cup Task Force czar Andrew Giuliani. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy were among those who attended the U.S.’ first match, against Paraguay.
Britain wouldn’t have its latest likely next prime minister if not for soccer.
Andy Burnham, the former Greater Manchester mayor elected to the U.K. Parliament in a closely-watched by-election on Thursday, is expected to oust Prime Minister Keir Starmer as Labour Party leader in a matter of weeks. The sport propelled his political rise.
The pivotal moment of Burnham’s long political career came in 2009, when he was the Cabinet minister for culture, media and sport under then-PM Gordon Brown. Burnham was asked to return to his native Liverpool for a memorial commemorating the Hillsborough Disaster.
The 1989 event remains Britain’s worst-ever sporting catastrophe. Almost 100 Liverpool fans were crushed to death at a cup game in South Yorkshire, following a series of disastrous crowd control errors by police chiefs and stadium staff.
The horror of the day was compounded in the immediate aftermath, when police sought to cover up their mistakes by falsely blaming drunken Liverpool fans for the crush. The lies were amplified by a willing national media and allowed to linger for years; the city grieved and demanded justice. Bereaved families campaigned for years. But no one listened, and no one was held accountable.
Born in Liverpool and steeped in soccer culture, Burnham knew all this as he headed to the memorial at Liverpool’s Anfield stadium 20 years later. He was well aware how a young government envoy would be greeted by the crowd, still raging at the injustice two decades on. But to his credit, he went anyway — and was met with a wall of heckles, chants and protest songs from the part of Anfield, known as the Kop, where the team’s loudest supporters congregate. (The video of his halting, shattered-looking appearance is well worth watching.)
Burnham — until then a typical career politician in Westminster — has described the day as a seminal moment. He returned to Cabinet and demanded a new inquiry into Hillsborough. Three years later its report revealed every claim made by the justice campaigners — of police failures and a scandalous cover-up — had been true. The government was forced to apologize.
Burnham was widely praised for his role in exposing the truth about Hillsborough. But more significant in his ultimate rise to power would be the shift in his own psyche. “I always say that I took my first steps out of Westminster on 15 April 2009 when I walked out to face the Kop,” he wrote in his memoir, “Head North,” penned with close friend (and Hillsborough survivor) Steve Rotheram. “Things were never the same after that day.”
Burnham says his experiences dealing with the Hillsborough justice campaign shaped his view of the Westminster political machine, as an arrogant and failing institution which ignores English regions outside of London. Eight years later he would quit Westminster altogether to become a mayor in his native northwest.
Fast-forward to 2026, and Burnham finds himself in an enviable position — an experienced politician able to cast himself as a political outsider ready to take on the Westminster elites. (While Starmer supports the North London-based champions Arsenal, Burnham is a season ticket holder at his beloved Everton F.C., and is regularly photographed jogging in a vintage Everton jersey.) It’s a familiar narrative which chimes with disgruntled voters everywhere.
Read Jack’s Blue Light News Magazine profile of Andy Burnham here and Blue Light News’s full coverage of the Makerfield by-election and its unfolding fallout here.
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