On Friday, a longtime friend of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the independent candidate for president, delivered boxes carrying 110,000 signatures to election officials in Arizona, to secure ballot access in a critical battleground state.
A vast majority of those signatures, according to two people closely involved with the campaign’s operations, were not gathered by local volunteers, or even by paid canvassers working for the campaign. Instead, the people said, they came from a super PAC backing Mr. Kennedy that gathered signatures in Arizona months ago but set them aside after their efforts prompted legal challenges.
The issue of who collected the signatures is critical because coordination between super PACs and campaign committees is banned under federal law, though that rule — meant to limit the influence of megadonors on campaigns — has steadily eroded in recent years, as regulators have allowed exceptions and political groups have found workarounds. Among other prohibitions, super PACs are not allowed to give “in-kind” contributions to a campaign — basically, providing services free of charge.
On Monday, Stefanie Spear, a Kennedy campaign spokeswoman, said she could not confirm that account. “What the campaign knows is that Kennedy supporters Friday submitted 110,000 signatures in Phoenix, more than double the required 42,303 signatures,” she said.
Asked if the campaign knew where the signatures had come from, she said: “That’s all the information I have now.”
Top officials on the Kennedy campaign had discussed as recently as early August how they could use the signatures gathered by the super PAC, American Values 2024, to apply for ballot access in Arizona, according to the two people, who were granted anonymity to describe what they regarded as a potentially illegal arrangement.
The campaign’s situation was dire: Volunteers in Arizona had been able to collect no more than 9,000 signatures, far short of the more than 42,000 valid signatures needed, according to the two people and a third person who has been briefed on the volunteers’ efforts. At the same time, the campaign was running short on cash that would be required to hire a canvassing company to gather more signatures — at the end of July, according to a campaign finance report filed on Monday, the campaign had $3.9 million on hand, and owed $3.5 million.
The campaign’s discussions about the super PAC signatures caused internal division, because of concerns that using them could put the campaign in legal jeopardy, the two people involved with the campaign said.
Representatives for American Values 2024 did not respond to detailed requests for comment. Mr. Kennedy’s friend who handed in the signatures — an Arizona businessman named Glenn Rink who has ties to Mr. Kennedy through the environmental movement — did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Saurav Ghosh, the director of federal campaign finance reform at the Campaign Legal Center, a watchdog group, said the circumstances raised legal questions, particularly given the history of the super PAC’s signature-collecting efforts.
“It certainly sounds like a situation that involves coordination and involves the super PAC making an illegal in-kind contribution to the campaign,” Mr. Ghosh said, adding, “Giving the campaign this plausible deniability about their involvement, I think, is extremely problematic.”
Since leaving the Democratic Party last fall and becoming an independent candidate, Mr. Kennedy has embarked on an expensive, time-consuming and logistically complex effort to get on the presidential ballot in all 50 states. The campaign has spent millions of dollars on signature-gathering firms and other ballot-access expenses, largely bankrolled by his running mate, Nicole Shanahan, a Silicon Valley investor who was once married to the Google co-founder Sergey Brin.
As of Monday, according to a New York Times analysis, Mr. Kennedy was officially on the ballot in 19 states, and the campaign was waiting for state approval in at least a dozen more. He has faced legal challenges in several states, including in New York, where a judge this month ruled that his petition was invalid because it was based on a “sham” address he maintained for residency purposes.
In the early months of Mr. Kennedy’s push for ballot access, American Values — which has been supported by $25 million in contributions from Timothy Mellon, a reclusive Republican billionaire — said it would spent more than $10 million to help with access.
In February, the PAC announced it had gathered enough signatures for ballot access in Arizona, Michigan, Georgia and South Carolina — an effort that cost at least $2.4 million, campaign finance filings show.
Three weeks after the announcement, the PAC said it would no longer pursue ballot access. The decision came after the Democratic National Committee filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission over the PAC’s ballot-access effort, and a Democratic super PAC, Third Way, filed complaints with state elections officials.
Mr. Kennedy later secured ballot access in Michigan as the nominee of a little-known political party; he got on the ballot in Georgia by submitting signatures; and he got on the ballot in South Carolina through another minor party.
But Arizona has been a looming problem for months, according to several people involved in or briefed on internal campaign discussions, as the campaign’s leadership tried to figure out how to proceed without the super PAC’s signatures.
In April, Carlos Sierra, a Kennedy campaign organizer, told Kennedy backers in a Zoom call that the super PAC’s signatures would not be used in Arizona, according to The Washington Post. “We are going to be getting Arizona all over again, so those of you that are on this call from Arizona, we are going to have to go back and get those signatures, so don’t think it is over yet. It is not,” Mr. Sierra said, The Post reported.
Volunteers were summoned, and the campaign also discussed paying a ballot-access firm to gather new signatures.
But some in the campaign’s leadership were hesitant to spend money duplicating the PAC’s work, according to the two people involved in the campaign’s internal deliberations.
As the volunteer effort appeared to be coming up short, in recent weeks campaign leadership discussed trying to buy a portion of the signatures from the super PAC, at a cost of about $700,000, the people said.
Another plan discussed by senior campaign leaders was to have the super PAC’s signatures delivered, without payment or explanation, to Mr. Rink, they said.
Mr. Rink is listed as the chair of Waterkeeper Alliance, a network of environmental organizations founded by Mr. Kennedy in 1999. Mr. Kennedy was also on the advisory board of a wastewater treatment company Mr. Rink founded, AbTech Industries.
On Friday, local news media in Arizona published a photograph of Mr. Rink wheeling the signatures into the secretary of state’s office in Phoenix. The next day, the campaign announced that “Kennedy supporters” — not “the campaign,” as most of their press notifications are worded — had submitted the signatures, and quoted Mr. Rink as an Arizona elector for Mr. Kennedy.
“This is an honor of my lifetime to be a part of ensuring Arizonans have an independent choice this November,” Mr. Rink said. “Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is the only candidate that will heal the divide, bring peace to the world and unravel government corruption.”
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