2/27/09 

Columbus Dispatch 

Simone Sebastian

Columbus school-board President Carol Perkins and board member Bryan O. Steward will challenge the county elections board’s decision to remove them from the November ballot, they announced today.

The Franklin County Board of Elections decided last week that Perkins and Steward did not have enough valid signatures on their petitions to qualify. Candidates must file 300 signatures to have their names placed on the ballot, but they can be expunged for many reasons – if the signature is in print, if the signer is not registered vote or if the address listed isn’t the one on record, for instance.

Perkins and Steward will make their cases to the elections board at its meeting 3 p.m. Monday.

The school board has three full-term seats and one partial-term seat on the November ballot. Without Perkins, the three remaining candidates for the full-term seats will run uncontested. Steward was the only person seeking the partial-term seat. Without him, the seat will be filled by a write-in candidate.

Steward, 40, was appointed to the board this month to take the seat of former board President Terry Boyd. But the appointment lasts only through the end of the year.

In all, three of six candidates who turned in petitions for the Columbus school-board races were disqualified. In addition to Perkins and Steward, newcomer Claudia Y. De Leon, 24, was knocked from the ballot. The board determined that she needed 132 additional valid names.

Perkins, 57, was 56 signatures shy of the required 300. She 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, elections officials said.

Steward’s petition fell 44 valid signatures short.

As it stands, Hanifah Kambon, 56; Michael D. Wiles, 53; and board member Ramona Reyes, 39, would be listed on the November ballot.