Candidate Petitions For Your Political Campaign Race
Unethical stuff from opposing parties when you’re trying to get your name on the ballot in a campaign race doesn’t go on everywhere. The State of Kentucky, admirably, has done away with some campaign registration nonsense by simply requiring only two or four valid signatures for many local offices. Kentucky is the exception, and states like California, New York, Ohio (and probably your state) are the rule.
The rule is: even if you try to comply with the petition requirements in your campaign race, they will do everything they can to use hyper-technical interpretations to try to invalidate your petitions.
In order to avoid this in your campaign race, the people who circulate your nominating petitions have to be carefully instructed about what to do and what not to do. There are some common problems that come up on nominating petitions, and you need to have some idea of what these instructions ought to include.
First, the candidate’s portion of the nominating petition must be completed accurately for your particular campaign race. If the candidate’s portion is not correct the entire petition will be declared invalid regardless of the number of signatures you have on it.
For example, if the petition form requires the candidate’s home address and precinct of residence, that must be included. If the candidate’s signature is required to be notarized, then it must be notarized, and so on.
Keep in mind that although we use the phrase “nominating petition,” the petition itself is often composed of several sheets. The petition form may have spaces for ten to twenty-five signatures, so if you need fifty or one hundred names, you will have to use separate sheets. Each separate sheet is called a part petition. Each part petition must be valid by itself, and comply with all regulations.
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