A mayoral primary? Never mind. Sharon Ferrucci (pictured) had her team working overtime double-checking petition forms this past week, but they couldn’t find enough valid signatures to place Jim Newton’s name on the Sept. 11 Democratic ballot.
Ferrucci, the city’s Democratic registrar of voters, Monday afternoon sent a “rejection of a Primary Petition” notice to the clerk’s office stating that Newton’s campaign failed to submit enough valid signatures of registered Democrats to qualify for a primary against incumbent Mayor John DeStefano. Newton fell more than 500 signatures short.
That means DeStefano has clear sailing until at least the November general election in his quest to win an eighth two-year term — and tie the record for longest-serving elected New Haven mayor. Republican Rick Elser and Green Ralph Ferrucci face DeStefano in the general election.
Newton’s campaign submitted 140 pages of petitions to Ferrucci’s office last week, most of them filled wth signatures of people supporting his quest to appear on the ballot. Newton needed 1,829 valid signatures to qualify.
Ferrucci said most of the pages had all 20 available slots filled. However, they appeared to be filled with lots and lots of invalid signatures. To be valid, signatures must come from registered Democrats currently living in New Haven.
Newton’s camp turned in most of the petitions at the last hour before the deadline last week.
Ferrucci said she has had her staff try to validate as many questionable signatures as possible. She had extra workers come in over the weekend to review Newton’s petitions. If an address was wrong, they looked up the name in directories to see if the voter had a new address in town, and then validated those signatures.
But Newton still came up way short. Ferrucci’s office certified only 1,313 valid signatures.
A random check of petitions in Ferrucci’s office Monday showed pages with as many as 15 out of 20 signatures ruled invalid.
On one table Ferrucci had a stack of 27 petitions that by rights could have been eliminated, she said, because no birth dates were listed for any of the signatures. Ferrucci’s staff was able to otherwise validate some of the signatures on those petitions. Ferrucci said she was holding that pile in reserve in case the otherwise-validated signatures would have made the difference in enabling Newton to make the ballot.
They didn’t.
“We worked so hard on this,” Ferrucci said. “We gave the benefit of the doubt no matter how the signature looked.”
What happened?
“I don’t know,” Jim Newton, who ran for mayor (and made the ballot) in 1999, said Monday afternoon. “We put together a team. We got what I thought were pretty legitimate signatures. Obviously there seemed to be some concerns about names matching up.”
Newton said he wants to “talk it over with the team” before announcing what if any next steps he might take in his campaign, or if the campaign is, as it appears, over.