After legal disputes, multiple missed deadlines, and close brushes with electoral fraud, Kanye West finally got his name onto the presidential ballot in three more states.
It was confirmed on Tuesday that the rapper officially qualified to appear on the ballot in Idaho and Minnesota as an independent candidate in the 2020 presidential election, according to the secretary of state offices in both states. Mark Goins, Tennessee’s coordinator of elections, also confirmed to The Tennessean, a local newspaper, that West had met the state’s qualifications to appear on the ballot, and “the office had counties stop verifying signatures after 332 were confirmed to be valid.”
Valid voter signatures have been the major hurdle of West’s campaign thus far. He failed to make the ballot in Illinois, New Jersey, and Ohio after it was determined that many of the signatures he submitted as part of his petitions to be listed as an independent candidate were invalid due to several issues, including no last name, no municipality listed, and people who were not registered to vote or didn’t live in the state.
Despite these difficulties, however, the rapper has managed to make it onto the ballot in Arkansas, Colorado, Oklahoma, Utah, and Vermont. According to TMZ, West—or at least the third-party petitioning group he’s hired to work on his behalf, Let the Voters Decide—has now turned his full attention to Arizona. He’ll need to collect 37,769 signatures in just over a week to get on the ticket and is reportedly willing to spend up to $500,000 to get the job done.
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