Kanye West’s outsider bid for the Oval Office has hit a major snag after his campaign withdrew a petition to appear on the New Jersey presidential ballot on Tuesday.
The rapper-turned-presidential candidate was on a hot streak as of late, filing petitions to appear on the ballots of Illinois, Missouri, Arkansas, and New Jersey in the past week. But West, who is confirmed to appear on the Oklahoma state presidential ballot, had missed several critical early filing dates, and his recent petitions have been scrutinized for strikingly similar pen strokes on rows of petition signatures.
West’s campaign announced that it was withdrawing the ballot petition in New Jersey in correspondence between his staff and Administrative Law Judge Gail Cookson, who was investigating the petitions filed just before the deadline last week.
“At this time, Kanye 2020 has no further option than to regrettably withdraw from New Jersey and cease further efforts to place Mr. West’s name on the New Jersey ballot,” a person from the Kanye 2020 campaign wrote to Cookson, according to the Associated Press.
Cookson accepted the email as an indication that West no longer planned to pursue his challenge to appear on the ballot.
“I will consider this email as a request for a withdrawal of your petition to be placed in nomination for the President of the United States in the State of New Jersey,” Cookson wrote.
Former Democratic congressional candidate Scott Salmon raised suspicions about the validity of petition signatures filed with the board of elections last week and told the AP that he was “glad” West’s team had done an about-face on appearing on the New Jersey ballot.
“I am glad that the Kanye campaign has realized that their petition was so deficient that it wasn’t even worth defending,” Salmon said in a phone interview. “It sort of highlights the fact that it shouldn’t have been submitted in the first place.”
West, who filed in Arkansas on Monday and listed “biblical life coach” Michelle Tidball as his running mate, has until 5 p.m. today to file at least 2,000 petition signatures if he is to appear on the Wisconsin presidential ballot.
