State election officials ruled that rapper Kanye West will not appear on Wisconsin’s 2020 presidential ballot, due to the required petition signatures being submitted too late.
His documents were filed less than three minutes after the Aug. 5, 5 p.m. deadline.
“When you’re late, you’re late,” Commissioner Julie Glancey said during the hearing at which West was voted against 5-1. “We’ve knocked people off the ballot for being one signature short. If we are holding their feet to the fire on the number of signatures, we need to hold their feet to the fire on the time they file.”
West faced a similar hurdle with his home state of Illinois, which voted 8-0 on Friday that his campaign fell short of the required signatures needed to appear on the ballot. The entertainer had filed 3,128 signatures on July 20, but one review found 1,928 of them invalid.
The minimum amount of signatures to appear as an independent candidate on the Illinois ballot this year is 2,500 – a number ordinarily 10 times higher, but reduced due to the coronavirus pandemic.
West’s name has similarly been removed from Ohio’s ballot, due to incorrect paperwork and from Montana, due to insufficient signatures.
He has qualified for the ballot so far in Iowa, Arkansas, Colorado, Oklahoma, Utah and Vermont. His ballot status is still pending in Missouri, West Virginia, Massachusetts and New Jersey. And earlier this week, he filed petitions to get on the ballot in Minnesota, Virginia and Wyoming.
West, who previously backed President Donald Trump, only recently began his run as an independent candidate for president. His candidacy was seen as a potential means of attracting black voters from Joe Biden, and his campaign has been associated with Republican operatives, although a private poll recently showed his candidacy is more likely to hurt Trump than Biden and would receive 1% of the vote nationally.
