(Updated to reflect more details of the objection; inserts Orman response)
A top Democratic legislative aide on Monday objected to more than 6,000 signatures on independent Greg Orman’s petition to get on the ballot in the Kansas governor’s race.
Will Lawrence, chief of staff for Senate Minority Leader Anthony Hensley, filed an objection to the signatures on Orman’s petitions just before 5 p.m. Monday.
If upheld by the state Objections Board, Orman could be kept off the general election ballot, a move that could potentially help Democratic nominee Laura Kelly by giving her a head-to-head campaign against Republican nominee Kris Kobach.
“After careful review of the petition,” the objection states, “a pattern of errors, deficiencies and potential illegal use of notaries raise doubts as to whether his name can appear on the general election ballot.”
Orman submitted a little more than 10,000 signatures on petitions he filed Aug. 6. He only needed to 5,000 to get on the ballot. Eliminating 6,000 signatures would be more than enough to keep Orman off the ballot.
Writing on behalf of Lawrence, lawyer Pedro Irigonegaray said the petition includes 6,040 signatures that were not submitted by county election offices to the state by the Aug. 16 deadline set by law.
Most of those signatures – about 5,700 were certified in Johnson and Sedgwick counties but were not turned into the state until after Aug. 16 – or 10 calendar days of the date that the petition was filed on Aug. 6.
The balance of the signatures that failed to meet the deadline were certified in Shawnee, Barber, Ellis, Finney and Marshall counties.
Orman’s spokesman called the letter a “frivolous filing,” saying it illustrates how far the Democratic Party will go to defend the current two-party political system.
“They want to avoid giving voters a real choice at all costs,” Sam Edelen said.
“Despite these desperate efforts to avoid electoral accountability, Greg Orman and John Doll have secured ballot access in November and will give Kansas voters a true independent choice in this election for the first time in generations,” Edelen said.
The objections letter also raises several other questions:
- It claims that individual notaries completed the notary section of each petition page without witnessing the signature of the person circulating the petition.
- The petitions contained a “substantial” number of notary dates on the signature pages that appear to be the same regardless of the dates the signatures were collected. “These instances are not likely possible unless notaries were dispensing the legal requirement of personally witnessing the signature of the affiant on each of these signature page.”
- The objections letter said there are “serious” questions about the qualifications of the individuals circulating petitions for the Orman campaign. Lawrence alleges that 323 signatures were gathered by someone with a felony drug conviction. Under state law, that person would be barred from circulating a petition because they would not be eligible to vote with the conviction.
- The objection also challenges the people hired from out of state to collect petition signatures. It questions one person collecting signatures whose address cannot be located, leaving doubt whether that person is eligible to circulate a petition in Kansas. It also notes that one person collected 1,004 signatures from 20 different counties from July 25 to July 31, meaning they would have had to gather one signature every 41/2 minutes if they worked 11-hour days with no breaks for seven straight days. “This statistics cast serious doubts as to the validity of the signatures.”
no longer willing to stand by as party bosses and special interests continue to run our state into the ground.”
