Worried his campaign may hurt Joe Biden’s reelection chances, Democrats are working overtime to prevent independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. from appearing on the 2024 ballot.

On Saturday, left-wing mouthpiece CNN reported Democrats have accelerated efforts to deny Kennedy ballot access in key battleground states ahead of the November contest. According to the report, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and Clear Choice PAC, a pro-Biden super PAC “focused on countering third party candidates,” have filed legal bids contesting Kennedy’s ballot access in “four states in the last month.” These include battleground states such as North Carolina and Nevada, as well as “Democratic strongholds.”

“Each of the filings claims Kennedy violated state laws that stipulate how independent candidates assemble the paperwork needed to qualify for a state’s ballot,” the report reads. “Democrats are alleging Kennedy’s campaign misled voters to sign their petitions, improperly formed a minor party to ease ballot qualification and committed procedural errors in its petitions across five states.”

According to The New York Times, Kennedy has officially gained ballot access in seven states, including Michigan. The independent candidate’s campaign has claimed it’s acquired enough signatures to appear on the ballot in 13 other states, although official certification is still pending. Among those states are North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Nevada.

CNN admits the DNC’s challenges are part of Democrats’ “broader strategy” to squash Kennedy’s campaign “in hopes of keeping the support of voters who backed Biden in 2020 but may consider Kennedy in November, potentially tilting the outcome of an election that’s expected to be decided by narrow margins.” The Times first reported on Biden and Democrats’ anti-democratic strategy against Kennedy and other third-party candidates in October.

The tactics mirror those Democrats unsuccessfully used to boot former President Donald Trump off of 2024 ballots. Over the past year, leftist officials in Colorado and Maine employed an absurd legal theory regarding Section 3 of the 14th Amendment to unilaterally remove Trump from their states’ primary ballots. The U.S. Supreme Court unanimously shot down the authoritarian effort in March.

Rinse and Repeat

Despite their professed support for “democracy,” 2024 isn’t the first presidential election year in which Democrats have deployed underhanded maneuvers to prevent left-leaning third party candidates from appearing on the ballot.

During the 2022 midterms, for example, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee — which at the time was represented by Russia collusion hoaxer Marc Elias’ law firm — went to extensive efforts to prevent the Green Party from appearing on North Carolina’s fall ballot. This was done despite the Green Party submitting “thousands” of signatures to the state Board of Elections for its candidate to gain ballot access.

As Victoria Marshall wrote in these pages, Matthew Hoh, the Green Party candidate, “received text messages from the DSCC asking him to remove his signature from the petition and saying ‘the Green Party takes votes away from Democrats, which helps Republicans win.’” After North Carolina’s Democrat-controlled elections board “voted not to certify the Green Party,” a federal judge overturned the decision, allowing Hoh to appear on the 2022 ballot.

These tactics were also on display in the 2020 election, in which Democrat-aligned groups successfully kept the Green Party off the November ballot in key states such as Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.

As noted by Federalist Editor-in-Chief Mollie Hemingway in her bestselling book, Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections, the Green Party’s nominee, Howie Hawkins, was denied ballot access in Wisconsin by the state elections commission on a technicality, despite the party “filing nearly twice the number of signatures necessary to appear on the ballot.” Rather than ruling on “whether the election commission had violated the law,” the Wisconsin Supreme Court “came up with a new standard that would get them the result they wanted.”

“According to the court, it was simply too close to the election to reprint ballots,” Hemingway wrote. “The Green Party would be kept off the ballot because the court thought upholding the party’s rights would be inconvenient.”

During the 2020 contest, Biden won Wisconsin and Pennsylvania by 20,682 and 81,660 votes, respectively.

Shawn Fleetwood is a staff writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He previously served as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood