Saturday, August 14, 2010
By PETER H. MILLIKEN
YOUNGSTOWN
Jim Traficant now has enough signatures to get on the Nov. 2 ballot as an independent candidate for 17th District congressman, a campaign volunteer said.
Werner Lange of Newton Falls made that statement at a Friday news conference outside the Mahoning County Board of Elections.
Lange issued to the press a list of 40 signatures on Traficant’s petitions, which he said were improperly invalidated by boards of elections in Mahoning, Trumbull and Portage counties.
Among that group are 14 petition signers listed by the elections boards as unregistered, but who are actually registered voters; and 19 listed by those boards as nongenuine signatures, but which match their signatures on file at the boards, Lange said.
As elections boards have re-evaluated signatures, Traficant closed the gap from being 107 signatures short to 31 signatures short of the 2,141 valid petition signatures from registered voters, which elections officials said he needs to get on the ballot.
The Trumbull County Board of Elections recently deadlocked in a 2-2 vote on whether Traficant qualifies for the ballot and sent the dispute to Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner for resolution.
Lange said Traficant’s campaign is preparing to petition the Ohio Supreme Court for a writ of mandamus, which would order the boards of elections to authenticate Traficant as an independent candidate.
Lange called upon the elections boards “to revisit their certified petitions and allow those 40 voters that are legitimately valid signatures” to be added to Traficant’s total.
“The legislative intent in election law is to apply the least restrictive standard in judging signature validation,” he said. The elections boards applied an “overly rigid standard,” Lange said.
Thomas P. McCabe, Mahoning County elections director, said the board’s petition-signature verification procedure is the same for all candidates.
“We check every petition the same. They were short the signatures. If they would have put as much work into getting signatures as they are in now fighting over these signatures, they wouldn’t have this issue,” McCabe said.
“We’ve been through these petitions three times now. We’re confident that we’ve checked these signatures and that we verified every eligible voter that was qualified to sign these,” McCabe concluded.