Thomas Breen photos
The clock struck 4 — and Eddie Gist was still waiting for the doors to open.
As a result, Newhallville Democrats won’t be able to vote for Gist in a Sept. 10 primary for a Board of Alders seat —not because he failed to collect enough signatures to make it onto the primary ballot, but because a distant parking space and a delayed elevator ride left him two minutes too late to drop off his petition.
Gist, a 62-year-old assistant director at the McClam Funeral Home, is challenging Democratic incumbent Steve Winter in this year’s Ward 21 alder race. He’s one of four candidates in the race, including Winter, Anais Nunez, and Maceo Streater.
Winter, who won the local party’s endorsement at the town convention in July, will be on the Sept. 10 Democratic primary ballot, as will Nunez and Streater, who collected enough signatures to make the cut.
Gist thought that he too would be squaring off with the incumbent and two fellow challengers this September, since he had collected the requisite 85 signatures from registered Democrats in the ward in order to qualify for the primary.
But then bad luck, and the letter of the law, got in his way.
Gist told the Independent that he dropped off a list of 85 names at the Registrar of Voters office on Monday, two days before the Wednesday, 4 p.m. deadline.
On Tuesday at around 2 p.m., he got a call from Democratic Registrar of Voters Shannel Evans letting him know that 19 of those signatures were struck because her office could not confirm that they belonged to permanent Ward 21 residents.
So Gist had a little over 24 hours to gather 19 new signatures. He took off from work early, he said, to knock doors and gather names on Tuesday and Wednesday.
By around 3:30 on Wednesday, he was all set. He drove downtown from Dixwell to the municipal office building at 200 Orange St.
That’s when he hit his first snag. He couldn’t find any parking.
“You know,” he told the Independent, “parking is hard in downtown New Haven.”
He finally found a spot on Crown Street near Orange Street at around 3:45 p.m., a good 15 minutes before the hard 4 p.m. deadline for submitting his primary petition.
He walked the three blocks up to the municipal office building at 200 Orange St., arriving in the lobby at 3:55 p.m. Plenty of time to ascend one floor to the Registrar of Voters office.
Or so he thought.
The 200 Orange St. elevator.
He pressed the elevator button, and waited. And waited. And waited. Five minutes passed. The elevator still hadn’t come.
He finally got in the lift at 4 p.m., rose to the second floor, and made it to the registrar’s office at 4:02 p.m., he said.
Asked why he didn’t just take the stairs, he said he didn’t know where they were, having spent so little time in the building before.
When he got to the second-floor registrars office, Evans told him that he had arrived two minutes too late.
“I told her it was the elevator,” Gist recalled. “I was waiting for it to come down.” His pleas didn’t land.
“The deadline is 4 p.m.,” Deputy Registrar Liz DeMatteo confirmed for the Independent Thursday afternoon. “Because it’s set by the secretary of the state, we can’t extend any variances.”
This isn’t the first time that a candidate has missed the ballot for showing up a minute or two late to drop off their petitions, she said. This has happened at least a handful of times in recent memory.
“I’m more bitter than anything,” Gist told the Independent. “It’s like I’m being rejected for something I don’t have control of. It feels like I’m being pushed back.”
Even though he won’t be on the Democratic primary ballot, Gist did manage to submit to the City Clerk’s office in time the five signatures necessary to make it onto the November general election ballot as an unaffiliated candidate.
Winter, Nunez, and Streater have also all qualified for the November ballot as well, meaning that a three-way primary race for the Ward 21 seat on Sept. 10 will grow to a four-way general election race on Nov. 5.
How many additional signatures did he get? If it was just 19, some of them would likely have been struck. If it was 30, then he was probably okay. Frankly, "everybody", but apparently not Mr. Gist, knows that you should gather an extra 50% to account for those not legible or not actually registered either as voters, or Democrats, even though they think they are. Some may be registered in another town or ward, some may also vote Democrat yet be registered unaffiliated or for another party.