Evan McMullin, an independent running for president as a conservative option for those dissatisfied with Donald Trump, appears to be stuck with an inadvertent running mate, prompting some public snickering.
McMullin listed a Nathan Johnson as his vice presidential nominee in all nine states in which he officially qualified to appear on the ballot. According to Politico, McMullin's campaign wouldn't identify Johnson other than saying that he was chosen as a placeholder until an actual running mate could be chosen.
But top election officials in eight of the nine states say his campaign can't replace Johnson's name with someone else on their November ballots.
"It cannot be changed. We already have machines that are complete," Meg Casper, a spokeswoman for Louisiana's Secretary of State, told Politico. Officials in Utah, Idaho, Iowa, Minnesota, Arkansas, South Carolina and Virginia all said the essentially the same thing. But that has put the makeshift campaign in a bind and prompted wags to joke about combing the nation to find the most-qualified Nathan Johnson.
"It's a placeholder," said Rick Wilson, senior adviser to McMullin and his campaign's communications chief, in response to Politico's inquiry about Johnson. "We will have a V.P. nomination."
"I don't personally know the guy," Wilson said of Johnson. "He's somebody that they vetted as a placeholder. That's all it is."
"We thought it would be inappropriate to just grab the first person that walked off the street instead of vetting them, which is what we're doing," Wilson continued. "Nathan is a guy who's on the ballot right now with the full understanding that this is going to swap out in the immediate future. Our legal people have also had a long look at this thing and they're confident that we can do this, we can make this thing work."
On Twitter, observers speculated about Johnson's identity:
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