Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Won’t Be on New York Ballot, Supreme Court Rules

The candidate had asked the justices to intervene after a state judge found that he had used an improper home address in election paperwork.

The Supreme Court said on Friday that it would not restore Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to the ballot in New York after a state court judge ruled that he had used a sham address on his nominating petition.

The court’s brief order gave no reasons, which is typical when it rules on emergency applications. No dissents were noted.

Mr. Kennedy has suspended his campaign and endorsed former President Donald J. Trump. But his lawyers told the justices that New Yorkers should be permitted to cast their votes for him. “A suspended campaign is not a terminated campaign,” they wrote.

Democrats have worked to keep third-party candidates off the ballot, viewing them as a threat to their ticket. In the past year, polling indicated that Mr. Kennedy would draw about the same number of votes from Mr. Trump and President Biden, while some more recent polls suggested that he would pull more voters from Mr. Trump than from Vice President Kamala Harris.

A New York law requires candidates to specify their “place of residence,” which it defines as their “fixed, permanent and principal home” to which they “always intend to return.”

Mr. Kennedy spends much of his time in a Los Angeles home he shares with his wife, the actress Cheryl Hines. But the petition listed an address in Katonah, a town in Westchester County. His lawyers told the Supreme Court that he rents a spare bedroom from a childhood friend there and “has stayed overnight on one occasion.”

In a sworn statement, Mr. Kennedy said he was “at the very marrow of my being, a New Yorker” and intended to return when Ms. Hines retired.

A group of New York residents — backed by Clear Choice, a political action committee aligned with Democrats — sued, saying the address did not satisfy the law’s requirements. A state trial judge agreed.

“Given the size and appearance of the spare bedroom as shown in the photographs admitted into evidence,” Justice Christina L. Ryba wrote last month, “the court finds Kennedy’s testimony that he may return to that bedroom to reside with his wife, family members, multiple pets and all of his personal belongings to be highly improbable, if not preposterous.” State appeals courts let that ruling stand.

Lawyers for Mr. Kennedy’s campaign, a political action committee and one of the more than 100,000 voters who had signed his nominating petition sued in federal court, saying that New York was not entitled to enforce the law to bar candidates for the presidency from the state’s ballot.

“The residence requirement as applied to this case serves no legitimate state interests at all,” they wrote, adding, “The address on Kennedy’s petition was and is entirely immaterial — both to voters and to New York.”

Mr. Kennedy’s lawyers also raised security concerns. “Disclosure of a controversial public figure’s home address can put that individual and his family in danger,” they wrote. “It can result in round-the-clock demonstrations outside his house, attacks on his home and harassment of his family, including his children. This is a severe burden to impose on a presidential candidate on pain of exclusion from the ballot.”

State elections officials, represented by Barbara D. Underwood, New York’s solicitor general, wrote that Mr. Kennedy’s request was a curious one.

“Kennedy has suspended his campaign for president, endorsed one of the major-party candidates and is litigating to remove his name from many states’ general election ballots,” Ms. Underwood wrote. “There is little irreparable harm to Kennedy from being removed from the ballot for an office he no longer seeks.”

She added that “the state’s interests in election integrity, fraud prevention and equal application of the law are all served by its requirement that candidates accurately disclose their residence on campaign filings.”