Will Robert F. Kennedy Jr. make the ballot in Pennsylvania?

Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has vowed to make the ballot in all 50 states.

With six months until the election, he’s officially done it in seven of them.

Whether he succeeds in the remaining states, particularly in key swing states such as Pennsylvania, could have a major impact on the election.

A Philadelphia Inquirer/New York Times/Siena College poll conducted last week showed a dead heat between President Joe Biden, 81, and former President Donald Trump, 77, with 10% of registered voters supporting Kennedy, 70.

Although it’s unclear whether Kennedy would draw more support away from Biden or Trump, in a close race, a third-party candidate with higher-than-typical support could tip the balance. In 2020, Pennsylvania was decided by a little more than 1 percentage point.

Biden’s campaign has already launched an offensive against Kennedy, holding a campaign event in North Philadelphia last month at which members of the Kennedy family endorsed the president.

Election law experts say Kennedy’s chances of getting on the ballot in Pennsylvania will largely come down to the breadth of his canvassing operation and legal support since his ballot access is expected to be challenged by Democrats.

Independent candidates and third-party nominees must file petitions for ballot access by Aug. 1. As an independent, Kennedy Jr. needs to file 5,000 signatures of registered voters and pay the state $200.

That’s a relatively low threshold in the nation’s sixth most populous state. Delaware, which has a fraction of Pennsylvania’s population, sets a signature threshold of 1% of registered voters — which for this election is more than 7,600. Missouri, which has roughly half of Pennsylvania’s population, has a threshold of 10,000.

The petition signers can be from anywhere in Pennsylvania, belong to a political party, or be unaffiliated.

A spokesperson for Kennedy’s campaign said volunteers will soon begin collecting signatures in Pennsylvania. Campaigns could start filling them out in mid-February.

The Kennedy campaign is focusing on states with the most imminent deadlines first. The campaign has also been filing close to or on the deadline, which gives opponents less time to mount challenges.

“We have the field teams, volunteers, legal teams, paid circulators, supporters, and strategists ready to get the job done,” campaign press secretary Stefanie Spear said in a release following Kennedy’s qualification for Delaware’s ballot earlier this month.

Kennedy’s petition signatures in Pennsylvania will need to survive expected legal challenges from the Democratic National Committee or outside groups. The DNC has launched an offensive against Kennedy, deploying mobile billboards to areas where he is campaigning that blast Kennedy for receiving donations from Trump donors.

“We’re expecting a close election in 2024 and we’re gonna be prepared for any contingency and that’s gonna include making sure third-party and independent candidates play by the rules,” DNC spokesperson Matt Corridoni said. “We’re also going to be working to define Robert Kennedy and make sure voters know he’s a spoiler in this race.”

The window for legal challenges will be relatively tight because Pennsylvania counties will need to begin sending out mail ballots by mid-September.

The Kennedy campaign told CNN that it aims to collect 60% more signatures than required in each state to avoid invalid signatures from undermining petitions.

Each state has requirements for ballot access, so the effort is expensive, requiring expertise and consultants to launch canvassing campaigns across the country.

“It can absolutely, positively be done, it’s just a matter of how much money you’re willing to wager to do it,” said Philadelphia-based GOP attorney Matt Wolfe, who works in campaign law.

It’s unclear whether Trump’s campaign or the Republican National Convention will challenge Kennedy.

“If the Democrats are gonna spend all that money to take him off the ballot, there’s certainly no reason for Republicans to expend their resources to do it even if they have the same unease, as I do, about who he is really going to hurt,” Wolfe said.

In 2018, Pennsylvania changed its requirements for third-party candidates to get on the ballot after a lawsuit filed by the Green, Libertarian, and Constitution Parties called the requirements overly burdensome.

Previously, the signature threshold was 2% of the number of votes cast for the top statewide vote-getter in the last election for which there was a statewide race.

In Kennedy’s case that would mean about 33,000 signatures, equivalent to what the top state Supreme Court vote-getter received in 2023, instead of the current 5,000.

There is a chance someone could challenge whether Kennedy’s candidacy is covered by the state court ruling for the three minor candidate parties because he is not a member of any of them.

The Department of State has said it will apply the change granted to those three parties to all minor parties and independent candidates but warns that voters could file objections, in which case it would be up to the court to decide whether Kennedy needs to fulfill the requirement laid out in Pennsylvania law.

“It’s still never easy to circulate petitions for any candidate and especially third-party candidates; they don’t have the same party resources and institutional know-how that established candidates do,” said Zach Wallen, an election lawyer based in Pittsburgh.

Kennedy Jr.’s campaign has had a string of legal victories in other states.

His lawyers succeeded in getting Utah to push back its petition deadline and Idaho to change its statutes on petition gathering. In Hawaii, the campaign defended a challenge from the state Democratic Party to invalidate Kennedy’s petition.

But Kennedy also faced some issues after a super PAC supporting his campaign, American Values 2024, launched an eight-figure plan to gather signatures on Kennedy’s behalf. After the DNC filed a complaint with the Federal Elections Commission alleging illegal coordination, the PAC had to suspend those efforts.

RFK Jr. has gotten on the ballot in seven states: Utah, Michigan, California, Delaware, Oklahoma, Hawaii, and Texas.

The campaign says it collected enough signatures for ballot access in eight other states — New Hampshire, Nevada, North Carolina, Idaho, Nebraska, Iowa, Ohio, and as of Thursday, New Jersey.

In some states, Kennedy linked up with lesser-known minor parties to circumvent some of the signature-gathering requirements.

He will appear on Michigan’s ballot on the Natural Law Party line, a party known for promoting transcendental meditation. In Delaware, he’s running as a candidate for the Independent Party of Delaware and in California, he’s on the ballot of the American Independent Party, a group founded in the 1960s to promote segregationist Alabama Gov. George Wallace’s third-party bid in 1968.

Kennedy has acknowledged the racist history of the party but said it has had a rebirth.

While Democrats are acting much more concerned with Kennedy’s candidacy, it’s not clear from polling that the independent hurts Biden more than Trump.

In the NYT/Siena polls of all six swing states — including Pennsylvania, where The Inquirer was a partner —Kennedy voters were evenly split between Trump and Biden if forced to choose a major candidate.

Most Kennedy supporters say their interest in Kennedy is an expression of displeasure with the two major candidates.

“The biggest thing is age,” said Cameron Kuipers, a 29-year-old accountant from Pittsburgh who participated in the Pennsylvania poll. He planned to vote for Kennedy after supporting Trump in 2020 because of the age of the two major-party candidates.

“At some point, older is not always better,” he said.

Shivani Gonzalez of the New York Times contributed to this article.