Philadelphia's Top Election Official May Get Tossed From May 19th Primary Ballot
By Steve Tawa
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- Stephanie Singer, one of three Philadelphia city commissioners, whose office is in charge of running elections in the city, is in imminent danger of getting booted from the May 19th primary ballot.
Singer is being challenged in her re-election bid over her petition signatures. Each candidate is required to submit at least 1,000 valid voter signatures to be included on the ballot.
But as hundreds of Singer's less than 1,500 submitted signatures have been ruled invalid, and the challenge process continues, today she was approaching the bare minimum to remain on the ballot.
Candidates for any citywide office must collect at least 1,000 legitimate signatures. The 1,485 signatures submitted by her campaign is the fewest number submitted by any of the nine candidates for city commissioner, who are running for two open slots in the Democratic primary.
Another candidate, Dennis Lee -- Singer's former chief deputy in the commissioners' office -- was removed from the ballot earlier this week but says he will appeal.
By the time challenges were set to resume today, the number of valid signatures on Singer's petitions had dwindled to 1,040 by her count and 1,030 by her challengers', with about 100 remaining contested signatures left to decide.
The lawyer challenging her petitions, Richard Hoy, says "only god can read some of the signatures." He said the petitions included "initials, ditto marks, signatures that would take an Egyptian hieroglyphics expert to read - even petitions in pencil."
Handwriting experts for both sides were spending 5-10 minutes evaluating each signature. The process was scheduled to resume at 3:30 this afternoon.
If a Philadelphia judge finds she didn't make the 1,000-signature cut, Singer says, she will look to Commonwealth Court.
"If we need to appeal to a higher court and get out of the old-boy-bully network in Philadelphia, we will do that," she said.
If he loses, Hoy will do likewise, saying dozens of signatures a Philadelphia judge ruled valid would be thrown out.
"Where people have signed a petition, but don't live at the address that they signed from," he said.
She says some of her petition signatories, including the wife of mayoral candidate Nelson Diaz, are ready to testify that they personally signed the petition and their signatures were incorrectly rejected.
Singer was first elected as city commissioner in 2011.
In all, 12 candidates for various offices have faced challenges, and among the marquee races, mayoral candidate Milton Street has survived his.