Kanye West Removed from Illinois Presidential Ballot

More than half of signatures submitted by the presidential hopeful were deemed invalid by election officials.

Kanye West's bid for president hit a roadblock in his home state of Illinois.

According to TMZ, West issued a petition for his name to be included on the state's presidential ballot in November. However, of the 3,128 signatures submitted in the documents, more than half (1,928) were ruled invalid by election officials, falling way short of the 2,500 needed in order to be featured on the ticket. It's unclear why the signatures were tossed, but the state's Board of Elections has given the rapper until August 21st to appeal the ruling and provide adequate signatures. If he fails to do so, West's name will be officially removed from the ballot, dealing a death blow to his chances of winning any significant portion of the vote as anything more than a high-profile write-in candidate.

West's misstep will be a boon for the campaigns of both Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden, his Democratic rival in the election. Though the rapper insinuated that his campaign was designed to siphon votes from Biden, polling suggests otherwise. The rapper's anti-vax, anti-choice, and generally anti-intellectual platform seems far more likely to steal votes from the current president than his challenger. But it's 2020 and, as we've learned week in and week out over the last six months, damn-near anything is on the table. So you might as well brace yourself. Even as West's prospect of a victory veers towards objectively impossible, Chances are the spectacles is far from over.