Kennedy Jr. campaign says he made presidential ballot in New Mexico

Jul. 6—Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will be on the ballot in New Mexico, his presidential campaign announced Saturday.

His campaign turned in 11,202 signatures about a week ago, more than triple the 3,561, or one-half of 1% of the number of people who voted in the last gubernatorial election, required under state law. On Saturday, his campaign shared a letter from Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver saying he had qualified for the ballot.

"We appreciate Secretary Oliver's efficiency in certifying the Kennedy-Shanahan ticket in New Mexico," Kennedy campaign senior counsel Paul Rossi said in a statement. "It's refreshing for a Secretary of State to avoid the partisan interference on display by election officials in Nevada and North Carolina."

Democrats on North Carolina's election board voted to keep Kennedy and fellow independent candidate Cornel West off the state's ballot late last month. In Nevada, his petitions were invalidated because they didn't list his running mate; Kennedy is suing the Secretary of State there and resubmitted revised petitions earlier this week, according to local media outlets.

Earlier this week, Toulouse Oliver's office went through the petitions of the various independent candidates seeking to make the November ballot. Joining Kennedy on the presidential ballot alongside the Democratic, Republican and Libertarian Party nominees will be Chase Oliver, who is the nominee of the national Libertarian Party. The New Mexico party split with the national one in 2022.

The left-wing thinker and activist West, and Shiva Ayyadurai, who rose to prominence as an election fraud conspiracy theorist in the wake of former President Donald Trump's loss and helped with the Arizona Senate's audit of the results there, also submitted petitions but had them disqualified.

Kennedy, the son of former New York senator and 1968 presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy and nephew of former President John F. Kennedy, is running for president as an independent. He is getting almost 10% of the vote in national polls at the moment, according to FiveThirtyEight's polling average.

He is officially on the ballot in 10 states, according to his campaign — California, Colorado, Delaware, Hawaii, Michigan, Minnesota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Utah and, now, New Mexico. His campaign has submitted signatures in 12 other states and says it has collected enough in five more.