Well, the rumor mill had a little something to it: There has been a signature problem:
Medford – Rep. Carl Sciortino, D-Medford, announced today that he has filed suit in Suffolk County Superior Court seeking ballot access certification by the Secretary of the Commonwealth William Galvin.
Official records show that Sciortino had a total of 186 signatures certified by Medford and Somerville in advance of the April 29 deadline. This is 36 in excess of the 150 needed to qualify for the ballot.
So here's what I don't understand: If official records show that he's got the signatures, why does he need to go to court to get on the ballot? How bad is this?
Anyone know?
Please share widely!
First you submit them to the local town or city hall. The registrars (or typically, the town clerk or assistant that is a registrar) look at every signature to see how many match up with the community’s voting list.
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p>Once that process is done, the campaign collects the signature sheets and submits them to the Secretary’s office. In Sciortino’s case, this would involve collecting sheets from both Medford and Somerville.
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p>I believe that standard practice would be for the clerk’s office to issue a receipt to the campaign when the sheets are submitted, and then this recept would be turned in to collect the papers. If that is the case here, Sciortino’s campaign would have receipts for the missing papers.
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p>In this case, the “official records” could be a summary sheet put together by the clerk’s office (how many submitted, how many valid signatures) that doesn’t synch up with the papers that were returned to the campaign.
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p>It’s a crazy system that is a by-product of our history of town government.
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p>We had a campaign in Gloucester where the challenger failed to submit the papers to the Secretary’s office, likely because the campaign team was used to local elections (where the signatures only need to be filed with the clerk’s office). They ended up running a sticker campaign.
look, I know that campaigns should be well enough organized and well enough versed in local campaign law, procedure, and practice that this kind of stuff doesn’t happen.
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p>But at the same time, there’s just no reason for the added bureaucracy. Come on Galvin, let’s streamline this process and make it more open using IT. 21st century, web 2.0, whatever you want to call it. Let’s get there.
It’s the law, not the Secretary’s office, that specifies how this is done.
I’d expect the lege to rubber stamp it.
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p>Galvin owns the process. He’s not free to change it without the legislature, but he owns the process. It’s his job to look at the process and try to clean it up where he can — and to ask the legislature for help cleaning it up where he can’t do it alone.
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p>Throwing ones hands up and exclaiming “I can’t do anything, the lege writes the laws” is just plain not earning ones salary if one is the Secretary of the Commonwealth or any other top official, elected or appointed.
mostly tongue in cheek, but not entirely:
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p>is requiring a candidate to slog through stupid layers of bureaucracy in order to get something simple accomplished for himself….a good way to vet whether an elected official could slog through stupid layers of bureaucracy in order to get something simple accomplished for his constituents?
of the names they certified – probably electronically. I would think they could easily be reconstructed.
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p>I would imagine that since laws or regulations are that the certified papers have to be delivered to the Secretary of State – a court would have to rule that he had the signatures and that he should be on the ballot. It seems to be a formality and additional steps to go through – but not a total impasse.
I would suspect a court would not allow a reciept as evidence because a challenge to the actual signatures would not be possible.
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p>Sounds like stickers in September
I think he’d win his case.
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p>If he lost the papers. He’s out of luck.
And – I have known people who have certified signatures, you change their minds and deliberately decide not to bring them to Boston. The two part step is deliberate.
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p>Of course I also know people who get tossed for – not putting their zip code on their papers, for not SIGNING the declaration ‘I acept the Nomination’, etc. And the Election Division guy keeps saying – are you SURE you want to turn these in? And the doofus said YES! so they promptly rejected him – he went to court, too.
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p>IMHO – if you cannot cope with the bureaucracy of getting, certifying, and filing papers – you have no business in the Legislature making decisions on laws that will affect others, Sen. Wilkerson.
Jill Stein, their candidate for Governor in 2002, was on the brink of qualifying for big bucks under then then-new Clean Elections Law.
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p>Unfortunately (or not depending on your point of view) the Greens failed have city and town clerks certify the matched contributions on time (a requirement of the law) and lost the funding.
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p>I think a progressive third-party governor elected with Clean Elections funding would have been a big improvement over what we got. And we’d probably still have the Clean Elections Law.
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p>But my point is that though these requirements might be fussy and stupid, it’s not exactly rocket surgery and a serious campaign should get signatures and certifications in the right places at the right times.
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p>Green-Rainbow said they wuz robbed by hostile local bureaucrats, but I think they just were not ready for prime time. In the instant case, unless state or local officials screwed up, I think the same thing.
If he got the signatures to get on the ballot and the town counted and recorded them all, he should be on the ballot. That’s all there is to it. Obviously, there’s some kinks in the system, but let’s hope they can be resolved without the necessity of resorting to a sticker campaign.
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p>Let this be a lesson to campaigns, though. In any campaign, double the amount of signatures that you actually need.
It is pretty obvious that Rep Sciortino will not be on the Primary Ballot this September 16th. There is plenty of precedent for refusing access – despite the spin from Carl’s camp.
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p>He will have to run a sticker campaign. It will be very hard for him to win.
That you’re a shill for Trane who has no interest in engaging in dialogue on this site, only spinning your boy’s talking points.
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p>You’re going to have to broaden your repertoire if you want to be taken seriously.
Well at least Trane is competent enough to get his name on the ballot – not like your man, Carl!
I wasn’t planning on actively volunteering for Sciortino, but now I am. I got my neighborhood out to vote for him before, when they didn’t know him. Now that they do, I’ll have to expand my area, because everyone here loves him and he already has their vote.
Don’t forget the stickers for all your neighbors!
Carl is in serious trouble – and there is no denying it. I wish you all the luck in the world..you will need it!
if Carl just happened to lose them, is what I want to know.
Plenty of precedence? Magic Darts, name one other case where a candidate had all the necessary signatures certified and recorded, no challenges to those signatures were presented, and the candidate did not appear on the ballot. Name one.
His signatures are NOT certified by the Secretary of State, as is required by law. They are certified by City Halls in Somerville & Medford – but NOT at Sec of State. And that, my friend,is the problem here.
I don’t pretend to be a lawyer, but I did a little digging in the Mass general laws. The only reference I found to the signature certification process was in Chapter 53, Section 7.
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p>If my reading of the law is correct, it seems that signature certification only takes place within the town registrar’s office, not the Secretary’s office. It does say that the papers then get turned in to the Secretary, but it’s not terribly clear.
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p>There are also likely regulations that govern this sort of thing, but I don’t know where to find those.
He did get double I think and they were certified. It is my understanding from reading this that the town halls “lost” his signature papers.
Obviously, he had more than he needed. I read that 186 were counted. That’s a net of 36. Maybe they would have lost them if he he had a net of 206. I’m just giving out good, general advice for anyone (not critiquing Carl in any way, shape or form)… if you want to be on a ballot, collect a lot of extra signatures. That’s sound advice for any campaign.
so that if you lose half as uncertified you still have enough. that’s why both Senate candidates on our side turned in over 20,000 signatures raw to towns.
Some campaigns have obtained the most recent voter registration and checked each signature beforehand. That way they know how many signatures on each sheet are valid w’r’t registration and precinct. Then they are only off by the few that city officials might say are “illegible” or invalid because of some other error.
Carl lost the papers – not the city halls or the secretary of state. He picked them up from Somerville & Medford City Halls & then lost them. Nobody else lost them — HE DID!
the “Dog Ate My Homework” defense doesn’t work. He has not secured Ballot access and won’t. I don’t think the Sec State will accept. “I picked up the papers and don’t have them anymore”.
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p>Good luck with a write in campaign AGAINST an opponent with Ballot access.
The question remains. Did Carl LOSE the signatures or were they STOLEN? If he is saying they were stolen – am I right to say that? – which Police Department did he file a report with? And why won’t he talk to the press?
I’m not sure if she is inferring from having a police report filed or was told – not much additional information though:
http://insidemedford.com/2008/…
the whole sciorintino-trane thing is simply a proxy fight between the Progressive Democrats of Somerville and the people who hate them.
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p>this hardly has anything to do with issues affecting the district.
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p>if you want to dive into this, please understand that all you’re doing is jumping in the middle of a cat fight between 2 small bands of people around davis square who personally don’t like each other.
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p>if you’re concerned about real issues, look elsewhere.
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that despite my asking on three occasions has not been answered. It would help in my forming an opinion on this.
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p>Did Rep Sciortino or someone on his team pick up said papers from the town halls? or did the town halls lose them?
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p>Thank you,
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p>EBO
As expected, the Superior Court denied Carl a place on the ballot. He will not be on the Primary ballot & will have to run a sticker campaign to get re-elected.
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p>However in Ward 7 Alderman, Bob Trane, we have a good, progressive Democrat who managed to get on the ballot. He will make a great state rep for us all.