(WHTM) – Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s campaign says they “will be on the ballot in Pennsylvania” with the petition deadline looming.

In a statement to abc27, the Kennedy campaign said they are “on track to have triple the required amount of signatures by the end of June.”

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This Week in Pennsylvania

Third-party candidates have until August 1, 2024, to file petitions with 5,000 signatures in order to appear on Pennsylvania’s general election ballot. Objections to those petitions can be filed until August 8.

The Kennedy campaign announced in early June that he’d qualified to appear on enough ballots to receive the 270 electoral votes needed to win the presidency. The campaign said they’d submitted signatures for 19 states, however many of those remain unverified.

RFK Jr. seizes on Trump verdict to bolster support

Donald Trump and Joe Biden both won their primaries, cementing their places on the Pennsylvania general election ballot. No other third-party presidential candidate has formally filed their petitions with the Department of State at this time.

Kennedy, an environmental lawyer and prominent anti-vaccine activist, abandoned his Democratic primary challenge to Biden last year and began campaigning as an independent. Among the major obstacles he faces is an expensive and time-consuming requirement to secure ballot access state by state, which will require him to collect millions of signatures that must be verified by election officials before his candidacy is approved.

He’s built a loyal following among people disaffected by American institutions including the government, corporations and the media, an ideologically eclectic group that will have an unpredictable impact on the election. Biden and Trump both fear that Kennedy will draw voters who might otherwise vote for them.

Trump Jr. calls RFK Jr. a ‘Democrat plant’

Kennedy could play spoiler in Pennsylvania, a state that helped swing the 2020 election toward Joe Biden. Libertarian Jo Jorgensen received 79,380 votes in Pennsylvania that year while Biden defeated Donald Trump by 80,555 votes.

In 2016, Trump won the Keystone State by 44,292 over Hillary Clinton while candidates from the Libertarian, Green, and Constitution parties received a combined 218,228 votes that year.

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