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law,” Planas said. “If the city clerk and the city attorney were wrong, that can be addressed at another time.”
But that may be the real problem. It’s never the crime
but the cover up that gets you.
The smoking gun in this case might be the emails between the city clerk and the city attorney ad the city clerk and the county elections department, which indicate that they knew there was a problem as early as Jan. 16. Emails back and forth between Gonzalez-Santamaria and Assistant Deputy Supervisor of Voter Services Michelle McClain also seem to show that county staffers were concerned about the timeline.
“I guess the question now is did the candidate start collecting signatures prior to filing the intent to run for office? If so, how should we proceed,” McClain wrote, showing that the county officials did raise an eyebrow to the dates.
Gonzalez-Santamaria forwarded it to City Attorney Jan Seiden, who had already told her that he thought it was legal to collect the signatures, and that the provision may only apply to when the petitions are filed, because one has to pay for the filing. But he also admitted that the city charter is silent on the matter.
He responded to her Jan. 17, a Saturday.
“Why else would someone collect
signatures if they did not have the present intent to run for office? Otherwise, it would seem a gigantic waste of time and effort,” Seiden wrote, quickly hinting at the true, legitimate remedy: collecting new signatures. After all, Garcia only needed 50!
“It would seem that, at the very least, the current cadidates subject to the issue are considering getting ‘duplicate and current’ petition signatures depending on whether the petitions have already been forwarded to elections for verification or not,” Seiden wrote. And they had. Obviously. He knew that.
“You should check with those candidates to determine what course of action they will follow and advise elections to either count what was submitted or await the ‘duplicate and current’ petitions from your office,” he ended.
Remember that Planas said his client was never consulted, just instructed on what to do.
But on Wednesday, Jan. 21, Gonzalez-Santamaria wrote McClain and provided a new “start date” for the collection of signatures: “You have advised that MDED requi
res a start date for the verification of signatures on petition forms for a candidate. In response to that request, as the Supervisor of Elections for the city, I agree that the date of the first signature on any petition gathered by any respective candidate will be the start date for verification for that candidate.”
Then she said Garcia’s start date would be Nov. 29, 2014.
So their fix is to change the start date of the petition gathering period. Naturally, they set the dates for everybody, not just the mayor. You know, to throw off our scent.
“She comes back and arbitrarily sets a date? Wait a minute. The statute says it’s when you file,” Cunill said. “They knew about it and they could have cured it. They had a good month.”
By then, Planas argues, the petitions had been accepted. “Nobody is going to disqualify a candidate based on that. That’s a technicality.
“And no court is going to set aside an election based on something procedural,” Planas said. “If they were fraudulent. If there were forged signatures, that is something major. That’s a substantive violation.
“In this case, it’s a procedural violation. What they are saying is he got them a couple of weeks early,” Planas said.
Um, yes. Exactly.
Oh, and that the city clerk and city attorney maybe conspired to do everything they could to ensure that the signatures did meet legal standards.
Said Cunill: “If you’re going to completely disregard the state statute and operate on your own, the citizens have a right to challenge that.”
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