MORGANTOWN — Morgantown Communications Manager Andrew Stacy said the city does not intend to further review city council candidate nominating petitions in light of concerns raised by a write-in candidate from April’s municipal election.
Todd Stainbrook, who ran unsuccessfully as a 7th Ward write-in, recently told Morgantown City Council that upon review of 7th Ward Councilor Barry Wendell’s petition, there appeared to be some irregularities.
As spelled out in the city’s charter, a candidate must collect 75 signatures from qualified voters in their respective ward in order to get on the ballot.
The candidate petitions in the 7th Ward race have been a storyline unto themselves. Stainbrook only entered the race as a write-in after Wendell’s challenger, Aaron Metz, admitted to forging petition signatures and withdrew his candidacy.
Stainbrook said he now believes Wendell had signatures improperly counted to get him to the needed threshold of 75 and onto the ballot — avoiding a situation in which there were no candidates listed for the 7th Ward.
Specifically, Stainbrook said there were as many as four signatures verified for Wendell that had dates well outside the permitted signature window from Jan. 7 to Feb. 11 of 2019.
On one page of Wendell’s nominating petition, there are four consecutive signatures representing three different addresses that appear to be dated to various dates in 2018.
The city concedes that there are signatures with improper dates, but not because they were improperly collected.
“The candidate petitions were not available until January of 2019. These were accepted because the persons signed within the timeframe but mistakenly wrote the wrong date as attested by the circulator of the petition,” Stacy explained.
Stainbrook went on to say that it also appears as if Wendell was the only candidate in the race to have signatures marked “wrong address,” that were ultimately counted.
Specifically, three signatures from 3288 University Avenue, which is the address of Colonial Park Apartments, were counted after initially being flagged.
“During the initial standard review of the addresses, one of the city’s election staff wrote “wrong address” on the petition if they were unable to locate the address at first attempt. These addresses were verified as correct during the city’s in-depth review with the Secretary of State’s office,” Stacy explained.
Wendell turned in 89 signatures, 75 of which were verified by the city.
Stacy explained that when questions about signatures were first raised back in March, the city asked for assistance from the West Virginia Secretary of State, but that the final determination on whether to count specific signatures fell to City Clerk Christine Wade.
This is as it should be according to Mike Queen, communications director for the Secretary of State’s office.
Queen said candidate nominating processes put in place by municipalities are provided for in the respective city charters, not state code, meaning it falls to the city to sort these issues out.
“The city charter actually trumps state code in many ways when it comes to this type of an issue,” Queen said.
Stainbrook said he believes the city’s charter is clear on this issue.
Section 7.02(a) of Morgantown’s charter deals with nominating petitions and states, in part, “The signatures shall be executed in ink or indelible pencil. Each signer shall indicate next to his signature the date of his signing and the place of his residence.”
The phrase “date of his signing” is one of two instances in the city’s founding document in which a phrase is emphasized in bold font. The other deals with the powers of the city manager, in Section 3.
“The city’s response to these dates simply doesn’t matter according to the charter, which makes it clear that the date is part of a valid signature,” Stainbrook said, explaining that he doesn’t intend to drop it.
“The city can’t just let it go. They need to answer the question. Who authorized it and why,” Stainbrook said.
Wendell said he isn’t concerned, explaining that he has done nothing improper and doesn’t understand why deciphering hand-written dates has become an issue more than three months after the election.
“I guess what I can say is I do have enemies and [Stainbrook] is aligned with them — people like the Biaforas and the Republican party — they don’t like me and they’re going to try to find some way to get at me, and others like Paul Brake and Bill Kawecki,” Wendell said.
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