RALEIGH, NC (WTVD) – The North Carolina Supreme Court on Monday upheld a lower court ruling that Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s name must be removed from the state’s ballot for the Nov. 5 presidential election.

The appeals court issued an order last week granting Kennedy’s request to stop the delivery of ballots containing his name. The state election board announced Friday that it would appeal that decision to the Supreme Court and asked the state’s highest court to expedite its decision.

That’s exactly what the court did on Monday, saying it had concluded that the NCBOE had failed to meet its “heavy duty” under the standard. Accordingly, “we deny their request for discretionary review.”

The court ordered the destruction of all printed ballots bearing Kennedy’s name and stated that the head of the Board of Elections and the heads of all county committees should be required to “certify the destruction of these invalid ballots in order to maintain public confidence in the upcoming election.”

The first mail-in ballots for the Nov. 5 election were scheduled to be mailed out Friday, but the court ruling forced election officials to delay so they could fill out new ballots without Kennedy being considered as a voting option.

Otherwise, state law required that the first mail-in ballots had to be mailed or delivered no later than 60 days before the general election, making Friday the deadline.

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“We recognize that expediting the process of printing new ballots will cost our election officials considerable time and effort and will impose significant costs on the state,” the judges wrote. “But that is a price the North Carolina Constitution requires us to pay to protect voters’ fundamental right to vote according to their conscience and to make that vote count.”

On Friday, the NCBOE said its staff would work throughout the weekend to begin coding new ballots without Kennedy’s name and to provide evidence of the new ballots to county election boards for review.

Kennedy, the We The People party candidate in North Carolina, had sued to be removed from the state’s ballot after suspending his campaign and supporting Republican candidate Donald Trump. But the Democratic majority on the state election board rejected the request, saying it was too late in the process of printing ballots and coding the counting machines. Kennedy then filed suit.

In a written dissent, Judge Allison Riggs stated that it is “not easy to remove a candidate’s name from a ballot after the ballot preparation process is complete.”

Riggs continued: “Each ballot type was reviewed to ensure it met the legal criteria for official ballots. Each ballot type was also coded to ensure that vote tellers correctly read the campaign and candidate on the ballot. Changes made at the beginning of the ballot may result in candidates and campaigns further down the ballot not being coded correctly.”

“So once Mr. Kennedy’s name, currently second on the ballot, is removed from the 2,348 different types of ballots, all campaigns and candidates under his name will have to be proofread, re-coded and quality controlled before being reprinted.”

The process of reprinting and compiling the election materials is expected to take more than two weeks, prosecutors said.

Different result in Michigan

The Michigan Supreme Court ruled Monday that Kennedy will appear on the state’s presidential ballot in November, ending Kennedy’s efforts to withdraw his candidacy.

On August 30, Kennedy sued Michigan’s Democratic Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson to have his name removed from the ballot.

Monday’s decision overturns a ruling by a lower appeals court on Friday and ensures that Kennedy’s name will appear on the key swing state’s ballot despite his withdrawal from the race.

The court stated in a brief order that Kennedy “has not demonstrated entitlement to this extraordinary compensation, so we reverse the judgment.”

“This clearly has nothing to do with the integrity of the ballot or the election,” Kennedy’s attorney Aaron Siri said in a written statement. “The goal is just the opposite: to get uninformed voters in Michigan to throw away their ballot for a withdrawn candidate.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report.