News from the De Lear campaign

The people at the LA County Registrar of Voters are nice and helpful, as far as I could tell in my brief contact with them, but the system is not set up to be helpful. There is only one place in the county to turn in petitions and signatures in lieu of a signing fee, and it is in Norwalk. You have to go to Norwalk to get the paperwork, then back to Norwalk to turn it in, and back again if something goes wrong with your paperwork or you want to contest signatures designated invalid. The kicker? The office is only open five days a week from 9-5. Got a job? You're out of luck.

Then there are stories like this, from Green Party Congressional candidate Byron De Lear (above):

We are attempting to address a mistake made by the County Registrar by working with the Sec State and the County Clerk.

There has been a error committed on the part of the Registrar in regard to "losing our paperwork", and then rediscovering it as of yesterday.

On February 23rd after much hard work I turned in 162 signatures from Greens in the 28th after registering 111 new folks, was sworn in and confirmed to be on the ballot through November as the GP candidate in CAL's 28th CD.

I was awaiting a confirmation in regard to how many signatures they would verify, and looking forward to the opportunity to provide any supplemental signatures needed in case their rejection superceded 12 signatures (thereby pulling me below the req. 150* from 162 delivered).

We never heard from the County Registrar since Feb 23rd until yesterday, March 20th.

This was obviously way past the deadline of March 10th, removing our opportunity to supply any needed supplemental signatures.

To me this is a very important conceptual issue based on a key aspect of Green politics, that being the Green Key Value of Grassroots Democracy.

Because I am running as a Green and per election code presented with a method to reach out to the community and do a combination registration and petition drive, in addition to informing my fellow existing Greens in the 28th CD about my candidacy and requesting they sign my petition in effort to forego the filing fee, I feel mandated to pursue this option with all due dilligence. Which we did.

I filed a report of the petition drive entitled, "A Migration Has Begun by Byron De Lear" which has been published on several Green lists including the National List Serve, California Forum in addition to several web sites including my candidate website, Seeing the Forest and Green Commons.

I got a call yesterday saying we are profusely sorry we lost your paperwork - it's our fault and we have rejected 36 of the signatures.

This put us down to 114 confirmed signtures but without any grace period or opportunity per election code to replace the rejected signatures to meet the
in-lieu of required amount.

They requested the filing fee of $360 -- pro-rated from $1621.

Today, we have been with the Registrar all day and in contact with the Sec of State and they are assisting us to ameliorate the situation.

Instead of just paying the $300 or so filing fee as a matter of principle we are asking for the opportunity to replace the rejected signatures as we would have if the paper work wasn't misplaced - probably about a week or so.

So this is the sordid tale from the front lines - and rest assured worst case scenario we will pay the pro-rated fee and be running through November.

*Byron needed the 150 sigs to forego the fee; only 40 signatures were required to get on the ballot.