Mayoral Hopefuls Struggling In Petition Drive

Tony Dawson couldn’t find any voters home, so he tracked them down where they work — under the tent of a hotdog cart and on the sidewalks by Yale-New Haven Hospital.

Dawson (pictured), one of four men seeking to challenge Mayor John DeStefano in a Sept. 13 Democratic Party primary, paid a visit to the hospital food cart area Thursday with a clipboard in hand. The visit was part of a two-week sprint to gather 2,092 signatures from registered Democrats by 4 p.m. on Wednesday in order to get on the ballot.

Since they launched their petition drives last Wednesday, the challengers have been trying out new ways to reach voters in the dead of summer. So far, over halfway into the drive, the campaigns reported hitting about 1,000 signatures each — which is less than half of the number they’ll need. To be safe, campaigns aim to submit 2,500 or 3,000 signatures each because some names may be tossed out if they are illegible or are not from registered Democrats.

The four candidates and their volunteers are encountering hurdles getting the job done — raising concerns that stringent ballot-access rules for party primaries (as opposed to the general election) are stifling democracy in Connecticut. State law requires sets a high bar for the number of required signatures: 5 percent of the registered party members. And state law gives the candidates only two weeks to gather those signatures this year, in the dead of summer.

“People are not home,” reported Dawson, a former alderman who works for Yale-New Haven Hospital’s police force.

So on Thursday Dawson decided to go to the people. At 6:30 a.m., he arrived at the Smilow Cancer Center not to report to work — he took the week off to focus on the petitions — but to collect signatures. By 1:30 p.m., he had collected 80 signatures and was asking for more.

As it neared 2 p.m., Dawson positioned himself on the sidewalk near the food carts at the corner of York and Cedar streets.

“Are you a New Haven resident?” he asked passersby.

Alexis Tyson (pictured) said yes and agreed to sign his petition. Dawson moved on to his next target.

“Hey, Hot Dog Man. Are you ready?” Dawson asked. Mike Calice (pictured at the top of the story), who runs a Jack’s Concessions cart, took the clipboard and his pen.

Dawson said he has a core group of 10 to 12 volunteers, organized by two-time mayoral candidate Jim Newton, who are helping with the petition drive. ​“We’re hitting the 1,000 mark,” he reported.

Dawson said volunteers go out every night to knock on doors of registered Democrats. That’s a more surefire way of getting signatures that will pass certification, because the volunteers are working from a list of names already approved by the registrar of voters.

But that’s also a slow method. And Dawson and his fellow candidates are ringing lots of bells that go unanswered.

Dawson said he’s finding that many people work two shifts and don’t come home until 7:30 or 8 p.m. So during the daytime, he hits public places like the hospital food courts. Taking a random sample of passersby has one major drawback: He can’t be sure if people are really registered Democrats in New Haven, so their signatures may not end up counting.

Kerekes Rescues 30 Signatures

Budget watchdog and psychotherapist Jeffrey Kerekes reported slightly better progress: So far, his campaign has collected 1,200 signatures, he said Thursday. That’s only counting those collected by 10 volunteers, however. Kerekes said the number is higher than 1,200 if you count the work of the other volunteers. He said he has distributed 100 clipboards to 100 volunteers to serve as ​“circulators” collecting signatures.

At 2:30 p.m. Thursday, he paid a visit to New Haven’s Democratic registrar of voters, Sharon Ferrucci (pictured), to show the product of their hard work.

Kerekes entered Ferrucci’s office holding two piles of paper: One stack held 560 signatures. The other held about 30 cards for newly registered voters. Kerekes, who has already made it onto the general election ballot as an independent (that’s far easier), was the first candidate to hand in a batch of signatures for the primary effort.

At first, the 30 new voters’ signatures appeared to be in danger of not getting counted.

“How do I know they signed the [registration] card first?” Ferrucci asked about the new voters. She said if she ​“clocks in” the signatures before the registration cards, then those new voters’ signatures would not count.

Kerekes made a defensive move to protect the signatures: He said if that’s the case, he would refrain from handing in the signatures until the voter registrations are registered. He said he had brought the first batch of signatures in at her request, to give her office more time to process them before crunch time. He warned that if he risked losing 30 signatures by handing them in at the same time as the voter registration cards, he could just take the signatures home and turn them in later.

The tactic appeared to work: Ferrucci agreed to time-stamp the voter registration cards first and the signatures second.

Kerekes emerged with a receipt and a sense of relief.

He said the petition drive has been hard work. ​“You would think that 100 volunteers would be sufficient,” he said. They’d only need to get 21 each. But the door-knocking effort has proved challenging, he said.

“The single biggest thing is no one’s home,” Kerekes said.

Bella Voter

Some candidates have gone around that problem by targeting places where people tend to be home — senior housing complexes.

Reached Thursday, mayoral candidate Robert Lee was preparing for a major push with his 10 volunteers at Bella Vista, the 2,000-person cluster of high rises at 339 Eastern St. That was Lee’s stronghold when he served as alderman for six years.

Dawson hit that complex on Wednesday, collecting 180 votes, he said.

Attorney Clifton Graves, the fourth challenger for the mayor’s seat, said he has also hit Bella Vista on the petition drive trail. Residents there are among the 35 volunteers he has working with his campaign, he said. On Thursday, Graves said he is ​“more than halfway” to getting 2,092 signatures; ​“we’re very confident” he’ll make the ballot.

Kerekes said collecting signatures from the elderly can have one drawback: They may have trouble seeing the petition, holding their hand steady enough to write between two close-together lines, or printing their name legibly.

On the petitions, voters must not only sign their names but print their names, too. No one else may legally do that for them, unless they are blind or unable to write. That leaves open the risk that the squiggly names will get tossed out due to illegibility, Kerekes said. To preempt that problem, his campaign typed a cover sheet for each page of signatures with a list of the names. He offered it to Ferrucci as an aid to deciphering the list.

“That might help,” Ferrucci replied. ​“Thank you.” She said she still faces a tall task in determining whether voters are registered and making sure they don’t sign the petition twice.

Attention Wal-Mart Petitioner

Lee has been encountering other problems, too, as he pounds pavement in search of signatures. He said he had been doing his petition drive outside the Wal-Mart on Foxon Boulevard until Wednesday night, when he got booted from the premises.

“They told us we’re not allowed to do the petitions anymore,” he said. The same thing happened when he stood outside Stop & Shop on Whalley Avenue and Walgreens, he said.

Kerekes encountered his own problem last week, when he was barred from collecting signatures inside City Hall.

Graves said one other problem is voter apathy: While some people are eager to sign up, others are not. ​“When they see us coming, people just don’t answer the door. People just don’t want to be involved in the process.”

Looney: It’s Doable

Kerekes said he believes the rules of the game are stacked against outsider candidates who challenge the incumbent. Mayor DeStefano, who’s seeking a 10th term, landed a spot on the ballot by getting his party endorsement; he doesn’t have to collect signatures.

Meanwhile, his challengers have to collect 2,092 signatures, a threshold that is set by state law. It’s based on 5 percent of the number of registered Democrats.

Kerekes said the bar is set too high: Incidentally, 2,092 signatures would be 20 percent of the number of people who voted last mayoral election, Kerekes pointed out.

In an interview Thursday, state Sen. Martin Looney called the bar appropriate.

​“It is by no means an insurmountable challenge,” Looney said. ​“I think candidates who are saying that it’s overly burdensome are really showing their lack of organizational capacity.”

To meet the threshold, ​“all you would need is just 12 dedicated volunteers,” Looney reasoned. If each volunteer collects just one page of 20 signatures per night for 12 nights, ​“the goal of the petition drive would be accomplished.” The campaign would have 2,880 signatures, which is enough of a buffer to pass certification.

“It is a difficult hurdle, but it’s one that candidates should begin planning for from the moment they become a candidate,” Looney said.

Candidates usually know far in advance that they’re not going to land the Democratic party endorsement, Looney said. They should be planning ​“weeks and months” ahead of the petition drive, lining up circulators and planning where to get the signatures. ​“All of that is part of the organizational challenge of a campaign.”

That’s what Looney did in 2001, when he snagged a spot on the ballot to challenge DeStefano in a highly competitive primary. At the time, Looney had already been involved in politics for decades, and had served in state legislature for 20 years. He was able to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars to hire staff, a chunk of it from Capitol lobbyists and PACs.

As of the latest filing, mayoral challengers were out-gunned by DeStefano 13 – 1 in campaign donations. Graves reported raising $14,100; Kerekes reported raising $2,875; Dawson reported raising $1,105. Lee said he hadn’t raised any money yet.

Looney was asked if it’s possible for a candidate to meet the petitioning threshold without being an incumbent politician with an experienced election team and lots of money.

“Candidates who have a viable community base do not find the petition threshold to be insurmountable,” Looney said. A network of volunteers and support from a broad range of campaign donors are both measures of the strength of a campaign, he argued.

“There are candidates who have been able to make that threshold,” he said: Looney made it in 2001. John Daniels did in 1989. Jim Newton did in 1999, though he failed on his second attempt in 2007.

Looney argued that the petition drive is easier these days. ​“It’s easier now to get a message out than it was in 2001,” he said, because of ​“social media and blogs and other kinds of Internet opportunities. There’s a range of ways you can get message out for free.”

The senator said it makes sense to have a higher threshold for the primary than for the general election, for which only 104 signatures, or 1 percent of the number of people who voted last election, are required.

“It’s entirely appropriate” that a party candidate ​“should demonstrate a higher viability,” he said. To prove viability, he said, candidates should demonstrate that they can get the petitions or have a ​“significant fundraising base — otherwise you have someone who has a campaign only in their head.”