RFK Jr. backer to spend $15 million to get him on 2024 ballots

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - American Values 2024, a fundraising "Super PAC" supporting third party presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., said on Tuesday it plans to spend up to $15 million getting him on the ballot in 10 states that will be important to winning the 2024race.

WHY IT'S IMPORTANT

While Kennedy is believed to have cross-party appeal, has raised millions of dollars and is faring at levels not seen by a third party candidate since the early 1990s in opinion polls, none of it matters if he can't get on state ballots - a cumbersome process made deliberately difficult by the Republican and Democratic parties over the years.

WHAT IT INVOLVES

AV24, as the Super PAC calls itself, will spend money to collect signatures by hand, as state law requires, in Arizona, California, Colorado, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Nevada, New York, and Texas, which it says represent approximately half of the signatures nationwide that Kennedy needs to get on the ballot in November.   

AV24 was on track to raise nearly $30 million after Kennedy, son of the Democratic senator who was assassinated in 1968, said in October he would run as an independent, AV24 co-founder Tony Lyons told Reuters. Millions have come from a former donor to Donald Trump, Timothy Mellon.

NOTABLE QUOTE

"We have chosen to pursue these critical states, some of them battlegrounds, due to the complexity of the state election codes and the volume of signatures necessary to achieve ballot access," said Deirdre Golffard, who advises the Super PAC.

(Reporting by Heather Timmons; Editing by Frances Kerry)