Kanye West
Photographer: Neilson Barnard / Getty Images
Photographer: Neilson Barnard / Getty Images
Voters in three more states will not see Kanye West on their presidential ballots this year.
Election officials in Ohio, Illinois and West Virginia ruled Friday that the rapper, who announced in July that he was running as president, was not eligible to appear in their state elections. The verdicts came a day after officials in Wisconsin and Montana decided that West was not eligible.
Several news outlets have reported that West’s late bid, 43, to go to the polls in several states, was helped by Republican lawyers as operatives with the hope that he could count votes from Democratic nominee Joe Biden to aid President Donald Trump’s re-election.
In her speech to the Democratic National Convention on Tuesday, former First Lady Michelle Obama referred to the wild spoiler campaign of West. “This is not the time to hold our votes in protest, or to play games with candidates who have no chance of winning,” she said.
West was disqualified in Ohio because information and a signature on a nominee petition and statement of candidacy for the fast and running mate Michelle Tidball did not match the paperwork used to gather necessary signatures for voters, said Frank LaRose, Secretary of State for the United States. Ohio, in a release.
Basic verification
“A signature is the most basic form of verification and an important, honorably secured measure to ensure that a candidate strives to be eligible to vote and that a voter is asked to sign a legitimate petition,” LaRose, a Republican, said in a statement. “There is no doubt that the Western nomination of petition and candidate statement did not meet the required threshold for certification.”
In Illinois, the home state of West, the State Board of Elections voted Friday 8-0 that it would not be eligible to vote there because it did not miss the 2,500 valid signatures, said spokesman Matt Dietrich. About 1,300 signatures were determined not to be genuine if the signer was not registered at the address shown, Dietrich said.
Electoral officials in West Virginia determined that West’s campaign had only 6,338 of the 7,144 valid signatures needed to qualify, said Jennifer Gardner, a spokeswoman for the Secretary of State’s office.
The Wisconsin Electoral Commission voted 5-1 on Thursday to deny access to the West because its campaign in nomination papers ran after the August 4 deadline for submission, spokesman Reid Magney said. In Montana, officials determined that the West’s campaign had only 3,972 valid signatures, short of the 5,000 needed to qualify, according to Susan Ames of the Montana Secretary of State’s office.
West has qualified to appear on the ballot in at least Arkansas, Colorado, Oklahoma, Utah and Vermont, according to election officials in those states. A spokesman for the Iowa State Secretary’s office said West’s nominating petitions have been accepted in that state but are still subject to objections.
(An earlier version corrected the spelling of West’s first name in header, first paragraph.)
(Updates with additional details from second paragraph.)
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