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Some investigative journalism is turning up evidence that the ballot-access drives of Cornel West and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. are being funded by Republican groups and activists that think these candidates will pull votes away from Joe Biden. In North Carolina, Trump activist Scott Presler gathered signatures outside a Trump rally to get West on the ballot. He told potential signers that West was a far-left Marxist who could take a point away from Biden. He was not the only one. Blitz Canvassing, a Republican firm that earned millions of dollars working for Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL), helped West collect more than the 13,800 signatures needed for ballot access. Some of the gatherers failed to sign the form, which will lead to court challenges. The firm refused requests to say who paid it for its work. Another group of signature gatherers refused to provide any information about their work, even after being subpoenaed.
In the D.C. suburbs, signature gatherers worked a Target parking lot asking people to sign a petition to keep Donald Trump off the ballot. Actually, it was a petition to get West on the Virginia ballot. One signature gatherer was told the petitions would be turned over to the state Republican Party, which is apparently in cahoots with West.
Last month, more than 80 paid out-of-state people went to Arizona to collect signatures for West. Many of the workers listed Wells Marketing, a secretive Missouri LLC, as their employer. The company is closely associated with Mark Jacoby, a California Republican operative who was convicted of voter registration fraud in 2009. In 2020, he was back at work collecting signatures for a different West, namely Kanye, in an effort to get Black voters to not vote for Joe Biden. Jacoby has a long history of asking people to sign petitions for one thing—say, allowing supermarkets to sell wine—when the petition is actually for something else, typically getting some left-wing candidate on the ballot to dilute the Democratic vote.
Cornel West's heavy reliance on paid signature gatherers could get him into legal trouble, since the company doing the work is de facto making an illegal in-kind campaign contribution that he is forbidden from accepting.
West isn't the only third-party candidate getting help from Republican donors, secret or otherwise. Republican megadonor Timothy Mellon donated $25 million to a super PAC supporting Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on the grounds that Kennedy's earlier work as an environmental lawyer could pull votes away from Biden. The Colorado Libertarian Party has allowed Kennedy to use its ballot line, even though Kennedy is anything but a Libertarian. The state chair, Hannah Goodman, says she despises Democrats and plans to vote for Trump, but thinks that by putting Kennedy on the ballot, she might help Trump eke out a plurality.
Kennedy could yet be a wild card. If the Democrats get some rich donor to start running ads touting Kennedy's anti-vaxx beliefs and speeches, he could end up taking more votes from anti-vaxx Trumpers than from Biden. That wouldn't be what the donors wanted.
Election experts say that as long as the first-past-the-post system is in place, there will always be spoilers. The only way to get rid of them is to introduce ranked-choice voting everywhere. Then someone who voted for West or Kennedy to make a point, would then have to state a second choice, and that is very unlikely to be Trump. In practice, then the first-choice vote would be a show vote and the second-choice vote would be the real vote. (V)