With polls showing many voters are dissatisfied with both President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump, Democratic and Republican operatives acted Monday to try to remove third-party and independent presidential candidates from Illinois’ Nov. 5 ballot.
Democratic-backed challenges were made to petitions filed by the presidential campaigns of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Green Party candidate Jill Stein, while Republicans filed challenges to Constitution Party candidate Randall Terry and Chase Oliver, a placeholder for the Libertarian Party.
Monday marked the end of the formal objection period to petitions from independent and third-party presidential candidates with the Illinois State Board of Elections.
Kennedy is a controversial heir to the storied political family, while Stein was the Green Party’s nominee in 2012 and 2016. The petition challenges were backed by the Democratic group Clear Choice Action, an offshoot of a political action committee formed by Biden allies to stop third-party or independent presidential candidacies that could hurt the president’s reelection challenges.
The group has made similar efforts to block challenges to Biden in New York and North Carolina.
In a statement about the Kennedy objection, the group said it was challenging the legitimacy of 66,487 of the 85,509 signatures submitted to the board on various grounds, which would leave the campaign below the minimum 25,000 valid signatures required to make the ballot.
The objection also contends that Kennedy listed as his home a residence in Katonah, New York, while his original statement of candidacy filed with the Federal Elections Commission lists a Los Angeles address as his residence.
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The Kennedy campaign provided no reaction to the challenge.
The group also alerted election officials that Stein’s petitions allegedly contained only 9,000 signatures, well below the 25,000 minimum required.
The candidate objections will formally become public when the elections board assigns the cases to hearing officers, which is expected to occur at its July 9 meeting.
The candidacy papers of Terry, of Tennessee, the Constitution Party presidential candidate, and Oliver, of Georgia, the Libertarian candidate, were challenged by Jeff Fiedler of River Grove, State Board of Elections records showed. Fiedler has been a paid staffer for the Chicago Republican Party.
If the challenges are successful, it would leave only Biden and Trump on Illinois’ general election presidential ballot.