Sunday, March 14, 2010
The candidate who almost wasn't
Christian Trejbal
Recent columns
- Montgomery schools' $6.2 million deficit
- This column does not compute
- Make political parties pay for their primaries
- Tough times ahead for schools
From the RoundTable blog
Sunshine Week kicks off today, and I'd like to share a story about open government, a story with politics, public documents and broken election rules.
The tale begins a couple of months ago in the run-up to the filing deadline for the May 4 local elections.
In order to get on the ballot, candidates must demonstrate community support. In most places, that means collecting 125 signatures from registered voters.
It is a minor hurdle, but it discourages casual candidates from cluttering the ballot.
There are all sorts of state election rules about the petitions and the signatures, but the important one for this story involves timing. For the May 4 elections, candidates had to wait until Jan. 1 to begin circulating petitions.
I heard a rumor that one candidate jumped the gun. Sure, it's a technicality, but it's also a violation of the law. Voters and other candidates have every right to demand that everyone follow the rules equally.
So I checked. Thanks to Virginia's Freedom of Information Act, every citizen is entitled to review petition sheets.
I called ahead, and when I arrived at the registrar's office, copies of the petitions were ready. Officials had redacted Social Security numbers, as they should to prevent identity theft, but otherwise I could see who had signed what petition when.
The rumor was true. A candidate had gathered three dozen signatures too soon. If those signatures did not count, it looked like the candidate would not qualify for the ballot.
The candidate had collected premature signatures for a few other candidates, too, but they had more than enough valid ones to spare and would remain on the ballot.
One candidate broke the rules, probably unintentionally, and one registrar's team missed it. If the records were not public, it would have slipped through the cracks.
Who were the candidate and registrar in question? I will not tell because it ultimately proved nothing more than an exercise in open government.
After election officials double-checked the numbers and found a sheet that had inadvertently been omitted, the candidate had enough signatures to qualify for the ballot -- 126, to be precise, one to spare.
The registrar updated the official record, and the ballot is once again secure.
That in some sense is a relief. As exciting as a mishap might have been, competition on the ballot is healthier for democracy. It sure beats uncontested races in which the same people win re-election repeatedly or where no one even runs. (I'm looking at you, Rich Creek, where no one filed to run for mayor.)
Citizens can and should cautiously trust their government. Officials and candidates sometimes make mistakes. (They sometimes cheat, too, but that is a different can of worms.) The Freedom of Information Act ensures that trust need not be blind.
If you must know who the guilty parties in this tale were, consider it a Sunshine Week challenge. The Freedom of Information Act empowers us all. You, too, can find out.
