DENVER — Despite a bold proclamation on his newly launched campaign website that he has secured a spot on Colorado’s 2024 ballot for a White House run, the imprisoned “Tiger King” of Netflix fame — Joseph Maldonado, better known as Joe Exotic — is not ready for presidential prime time in the Centennial State.
So says the Secretary of State’s Office, which on Tuesday told The Denver Post that it will return Maldonado’s $500 check “with instructions for steps the candidate must take in order to be on the ballot.”
The determination from the state’s election officials comes a day after multiple media outlets, citing Maldonado’s own presidential announcement, reported that the former zookeeper and federal inmate had gained a spot on the ballot — his first among the 50 states.
“The Secretary of State’s Office requires candidates to personally sign official documentation affirming they acknowledge state law requirements in addition to providing payment for ballot access,” said agency spokesman Jack Todd. “Since the 2024 presidential candidate paperwork has not been published and therefore was not completed by Maldonado, the department will be returning the check…”
Todd went on to say that his office can only place candidates on the ballot who are “bona fide members of a major political party” and that no such candidate list from any major party has been received.
“If a candidate is not a bona fide member of a major party, they have the option to become a write-in candidate,” he said.
It’s not clear from Maldonado’s website what party, if any, he is claiming and Todd said the presidential hopeful didn’t identify a party affiliation when he sent in his declaration. In the past, Maldonado has gone by the name Maldonado-Passage but refers to himself as simply Maldonado on his website.
He shot to fame in 2020 when the Netflix documentary, “Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness,” was released. The show, which featured Maldonado as the colorful owner of the G.W. Zoo in Wynnewood, Oklahoma, was watched by tens of millions as the pandemic forced people to stay home.
The series explored the little-known world of people who collect big cats and display them in private zoos and animal sanctuaries in the United States.
Maldonado, 60, was in trouble before the series ever aired, sentenced in January 2020 to 22 years in prison after a federal jury found him guilty of a murder-for-hire plot targeting competitor Carole Baskin, owner of a Florida-based tiger sanctuary.
Prosecutors said Maldonado offered $10,000 to an undercover FBI agent to kill Baskin during a recorded December 2017 meeting. In the recording, he told the agent, “Just like follow her into a mall parking lot and just cap her and drive off.” His attorneys have said their client wasn’t being serious.
Maldonado, who maintains his innocence and makes that point clear on his campaign website, also was convicted of killing five tigers, selling tiger cubs and falsifying wildlife records.
In the summer of 2021, a three-judge panel for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit in Denver ordered Maldonado to be resentenced to a shorter term. He announced at the end of that year that he had prostate cancer.
In January 2022, a federal judge reduced Maldonado’s sentence by one year. He said he’d be only the third person in history to run for president while locked up. He is serving his time at a prison in Texas.
Maldonado said on his website that he made Colorado his first choice of state in which to get on the ballot because of its low entry fee and “because it will assure me that I should be included in the polls and then we can start making others running for office, and that are in office, answer the questions you have that never get asked by anyone else.”
He is pushing for the decriminalization of marijuana nationwide and favors reforming land leasing policies at the U.S. Bureau of Land Management. Maldonado unsuccessfully ran for Oklahoma governor in 2018.
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