2/21/09 

Columbus Dispatch 

Elizabeth Gibson

Three of the six Columbus school-board candidates, including the board president and a new board member, were knocked off the November ballot yesterday because they did not have enough valid signatures on their nominating petitions.

The Franklin County Board of Elections also found yesterday that there was a lack of legitimate signatures for Whitehall City Council candidate and former Mayor Lynn Ochsendorf, 53, and two independent Columbus City Council candidates: Nicholas Schneider, 27, and Mataryun “Mo” Wright, 29.

All the candidates filed more than enough signatures, but a John Hancock can be thrown out for several reasons.

Columbus school board President Carol Perkins said she was “baffled” and “in shock” by the turn of events.

“I worked really hard to get the signatures, and I can only take people at face value when they say they’re registered,” she said last night. “I’m going to take a look tomorrow.”

She and fellow board member Bryan O. Steward were tossed from the ballot.

Steward, 40, was appointed to the board last week to take the seat of former board President Terry Boyd and needed to win the November election to maintain that position.

Last night, Steward called the elections board’s decision “a tough lesson to learn.”

“I guess I need to find out more information and decide where to go from here,” he said. “But it’s not going to diminish my commitment to the district, even if I have to serve it in some other form.”

Most of the candidates’ petitions were rejected because the signers were not registered voters at the addresses they listed, or they signed in print when their signatures were on record in cursive, said Karen Cotton, manager of election operations.

Other names were thrown out for being illegible, fake, in pencil, duplicates or the signature of the volunteer witnessing the petition.

Cotton said candidates tend to see a higher rate of invalid signatures if the people collecting them go to transient areas or aren’t well-trained.

Candidates who failed to file a complete petition are not allowed to refile, collect more signatures or file as write-in candidates. They have five days to appeal the decision by attempting to prove that some of the disqualified signatures are legitimate.

Six people had filed petitions to run for the Columbus school board. There will be three full-term seats and one partial-term seat on the November ballot.

The Elections Board approved the candidacies of Hanifah Kambon, 56, Michael D. Wiles, 53, and Ramona Reyes, 39, who was appointed to the school board in January. They all are running for the full-term seats and will be unopposed in lieu of a successful appeal.

Steward was the only candidate running for the partial-term seat and fell 44 signatures short of the required 300.

Officials of the elections board said that with Steward falling off the ballot — and in lieu of a successful appeal by Steward — a write-in candidate would have to be elected because no one else is running for that seat. The Board of Elections still is investigating whether a candidate who was disqualified from filing for a full-term seat could file as a write-in candidate for the half-term seat, and vice versa.

Perkins, 57, was 56 signatures shy of 300 and the other school-board candidate, Claudia Y. De Leon, 24, needed 132 additional valid names.

Perkins turned in 508 signatures, but three sheets of names were invalidated because she did not sign them in cursive, and one sheet was rejected because it appeared that the witness had allowed the same person to fill in three lines under different names, Cotton said.

Ochsendorf, who couldn’t be reached for comment last night, had 12 valid signatures and needed 15. That leaves incumbent Robert A. Bailey, 51, and Karen Liepack-Conison, 47, in the running for the 1st Ward Whitehall council seat.

Schneider and Wright both fell short of the necessary 1,000 signatures for Columbus council by more than 100.