Aey’s relentless effort to run for sheriff crosses the line

Aey’s relentless effort to run for sheriff crosses the line

Just when one would have thought that David P. Aey’s single-minded quest to become Mahoning County sheriff couldn’t have gotten much stranger, it turned bizarre.

Aey was denied access to the ballot in the March primary because the Ohio Supreme Court ruled that he did not meet the experience requirements to run for sheriff.

The state’s requirement that a sheriff’s candidate meet certain experience or educational benchmarks makes perfect sense. The law was changed years ago in an effort to move the office from the purely political into, at the very least, the quasi-professional. Candidates for judge and prosecutor and coroner all have specific professional requirements; it only made sense for the fourth part of the county’s law enforcement structure, the sheriff, to have law enforcement training and experience.

Aey, the court ruled, had in sufficient experience to satisfy the law, but Aey pushed about as far as he could. His educational resume was also far too thin to qualify his candidacy.

Sheriff Randall Wellington was unopposed in the primary, and there is no Republican candidate on the ballot in November. But Aey is trying to get back in the race, this time as a write-in, and after having claimed to have accomplished a prodigious educational feat since March — earning 66 college credit hours in less time than it take most mortals to go from freshman to sophomore.

Two things stand in Aey’s way: some natural skepticism about whether he was able to meet the state’s educational requirements in a relatively short period of time and a technical issue regarding state election law.

The academic issue will be considered at a hearing next week before the Mahoning County Board of Elections.

Whether state law allows him to file twice in the same election year for the same office as a Democrat, who was disqualified, in the primary and as a write-in in the general election will be decided by Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner. There are two Ohio Supreme Court rulings that could be read for or against Aey, but Brunner was a common pleas court judge, so she should be able to sort it out.

Over-reaching effort

The bizarre turn came as Aey was preparing for what appeared to be a full-court press before the board of elections this week. His attorney or someone in the attorney’s office — with or without Aey’s prior knowledge or concurrence — tried to issue subpoenas to people requiring them to appear before the board and to bring such things as few weeks worth of phone records. One person to get such a subpoena was this paper’s politics writer, David Skolnick.

This was such a broad-ranging fishing expedition — although what he was actually fishing for is unclear — that Aey should have been embarrassed to be even tangentially associated with it. That he was should raise a serious question in any voter’s mind as to what Aey would think was appropriate if he ever were sheriff.

Ohio’s law requiring candidates to have a relatively low level of law enforcement education and experience was designed to keep cowboys out of the office of sheriff. It did what it was supposed to do in March. Mahoning County residents can only hope that Aey doesn’t find a loophole to get on the ballot in November.