Thursday, April 19th, 2007...7:46 am
Greg, I Love You, But Puh-Leeze
I heard about the indictment of Russ Jones last night. I decided to wait until the morning to write anything, but I was going to say something like, “Look for Greg Patterson to claim that Jones is the victim of zealous prosecutors…”
Well, it turns out, he already had.
Here’s what Patterson says:
In order to get on the ballot, candidates have to circulate nominating petitions. The circulator must sign the back of the petition and attest that he witnessed signing of the petition. However, it’s common for a candidate to take a clipboard to a District or Rotary Meeting and leave the it on a table in the back while he speaks. He obviously doesn’t watch every signature.
Well, that’s a nice little scenario there, and yes, it does happen. However, it did not happen in this case. What happened here is that Jones signed an affidavit claiming to have been present when a petition was circulated at a retirement home in Yuma, when in fact he was in Phoenix. The law only says that you must be “present.” The candidate attending a meeting can argue that he is “present,” and unless Jones subscibes to a metaphysics or topology that I don’t fully understand, Jones can’t say he was “present” when he was 200 miles away.
It makes me laugh that Patterson seems to try to lump this in with the “partisan” prosecutions of Doug Martin and David Petersen. I don’t buy that either of those prosecutions was partisan, but this is the delusion that he is laboring under so I’ll give him that only for the sake of argument. But, in this case, the prosecution of Jones is being undertaken by Andrew Thomas and Joe Arpaio. Unless the “REP” that is put after the name on the ballot stands for “repartee,” the two of them are not Democratic partisans by any known definition of the word.
NB - To be fair, Patterson also went after Arpaio for the bizarre extortion allegations he made against Goddard last week. I was going to write about this silliness myself, but I ran out of time before my trip to Prescott. But, as it turns out that Patterson was just using it as a way to claim that that evil Terry Goddard was persecuting poor, defenseless Republicans.
4 Comments
April 19th, 2007 at 8:52 am
Word of warning, from the comments section of Patterson’s website:
“Next summer I am going to slip over to the Dem headquarters, place some full but unsigned petitions in there for a bunch of candidates. Then, after the petitions are due, I’m going down to the Sec State office to look at whether they signed those petitions and turned them in. Then I’m going to get them all kicked off the ballot because I have affidavits from all 15 petition signers that the candidate was not the circulator. How’s that for criminalizing politics…”
Dem. candidates beware.
April 19th, 2007 at 12:50 pm
Ted,
Are you really saying that you want Arpaio and Thomas to go after Jones?
What good comes of pursuing such a case? Aren’t there plenty of Dems that stand to be put under the microscope as well?
To me, this isn’t worth pursuing. Because of what happened to him last summer, he’ll be more careful with his petitions should he seek office again. He lost his election, so the case can’t be made that he’s now in office under false pretenses.
This is much ado about nothing.
April 20th, 2007 at 5:58 pm
I seem to remember that a few years back, Rep. John Allen anonymously sent Rep. Deb Gullett a bunch of petitions with the afidavits on the back unsigned. When she signed these and turned them in, he threatened to pursue prosecution against her, thus forcing her to drop out of the race. For this, he became a RINO-slaying hero of the right wing. Funny how the same bunch of folks are crying foul on behalf of Mr. Jones when he is accused of doing the same thing that Mrs. Gullet did.
The moral is, don’t sign these things unless you actually collected the signatures. Duh.
April 27th, 2007 at 1:31 pm
When I heard and read the story about the indictments for petition fraud, I was amazed that someone was finally enforcing the statutes.
The same thing happened in Page during the mayoral election. Mayor-elect Bill Justice had his petitions signed while he was nowhere insight at a business and then at a bar. He turned them in with his signature attesting to being present. When confronted by the city clerk he wrote a letter admitting his false filing but asked that the names be X’d off. Whoops. Crossed off or not it was still a false filing and that is illegal.
If false filing of nomination petitions is OK then lets repeal the statutes. If false filing is not legal then let’s prosecute those break the law.
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