I just got off the phone with the City Clerk’s office. Tom Farley submitted papers and there is a “challenge” (their word, not mine) to the papers filed. I was told that Farley’s papers have not been reviewed.
I forgot to confirm that it was James Howard who challenged the papers (I don’t think anyone else has standing, but I could be wrong) and I forgot to ask for a time-line. So much for this intrepid reporter’s skill set.
Update:
I looked up the Administrative Rules and am offering some excerpts:
2.05
(4) Any information which appears on a nomination paper is entitled to a presumption of validity. Notwithstanding any other provision of this chapter, errors in information contained in a nomination paper, committed by either a signer or a circulator, may be corrected by an affidavit of the circulator, an affidavit of the candidate, or an affidavit of a person who signed the nomination paper. The person giving the correcting affidavit shall have personal knowledge of the correct information and the correcting affidavit shall be filed with the filing officer not later than three calendar days after the applicable statutory due date for the nomination papers.
(5) Where any required item of information on a nomination paper is incomplete, the filing officer shall accept the information as complete if there has been substantial compliance with the law.
On the timing, I heard that a resolution is expected Monday, but if I read this another section correctly Tom Farley has three days to respond to the challenge (I think that means he has till the end of the day Monday; maybe he already has and that’s why people are saying Monday).
2.07 (4)
(b) The response to a challenge to nomination papers shall be filed, by the candidate challenged, within 3 calendar days of the filing of the challenge and shall be verified. After the deadline for filing a response to a challenge, but not later than the date for certifying candidates to the ballot, the board or the local filing
Those laying odds may be interested in this section (although it is kind of silly to lay odds without having more first hand information about the papers themselves).
2.07 (3)
(a) The burden is on the challenger to establish any insufficiency. If the challenger establishes that the information on the nomination paper is insufficient, the burden is on the challenged candidate to establish its sufficiency. The invalidity or disqualification of one or more signatures on a nomination paper shall not affect the validity of any other signatures on that paper.
Last, I also heard that it was James Howard or people close to him who challenged the papers.
Thomas J. Mertz
Just a little bit more on the next steps. I also found a memo from the Government Accountability Board. It reads in part:
It looks like there are ballot access issues with the Kenosha Board too. There it is the district and not the city that handles these things and the district posted and distributed information giving the wrong deadline for papers. City Clerks run elections on a regular basis and rarely make these kind of mistakes.
More here and here.