Nora Grace-Flood photo
Brad Macdowall: Someone messed up.
Hamden’s Democratic mayoral primary ballot will have three, not four, candidates listed, now that Registrar of Voters Rose Mentone announced that hopeful Brad Macdowall did not qualify through a petitioning process.
Macdowall was one of three Democrats gathering signatures to challenge party-endorsed candidate Lauren Garrett in a Sept. 14 mayoral primary.
Incumbent Mayor Curt Leng has qualified for the primary ballot along with a slate of nine aligned candidates for other offices.
Cyr: Top signature-gatherer.
And another challenger, Peter Cyr, has now gathered enough certified signatures to make the ballot as well.
Read about the candidates running for mayoral, legislative council, and board of ed seats, as well as the position of town clerk, here, here, and here.
Mayoral candidates needed 946 signatures of registered Democratic voters to make it onto the primary ballot.
Cyr received the highest number of valid signatures from registered Democratic Hamden residents. Mentone reported that she and her team counted 1,018 signatures for Cyr, 963 for Leng, and 801 for Macdowall.
Macdowall told the Independent that he believes the registrar lost a number of his petition sheets. He said that he received receipts for more than 68 sheets, though he said he was unsure how many he had turned in. He said that he is “exploring options with legal counsel.”
“I am confident we have enough ballot signatures to qualify,” he said, “but I’m not sure that we can take that to court” before the ballot is officially set on Monday. (He also cited a previous Independent article that suggested, inaccurately, that a reporter had independently verified that he had submitted over 1,000 signatures. We regret the error.)
“There’s no other mayoral candidate talking about housing, food security, or meaningful policing reform,” he said, explaining why he believes his candidacy adds to the race.
The deadline for Democrats to file petitions to make it onto the primary ballot was Aug. 11. On that day, the registrar of voters told the Independent, “I don’t see any reason why all three (petitioning candidates) won’t qualify.”
However, Mentone said that over 150 of Macdowall’s total signatures had come from non-voters, members of other parties, and duplicate names.
Town Clerk Vera Morrison noted that one additional sheet of signatures had come in from Macdowall after the Aug. 11 date because a volunteer for Macdowall’s campaign had accidentally sent it to New Britain. Morrison said that the state informed the town that because the paper was not sent to the correct location by the deadline, it would not count.
And, because each paper includes a maximum of 20 signatures, one additional page would not have made the difference necessary for Macdowall to successfully meet the minimum of 946 notarized names, anyway.
“I resent him for blaming me for the fact that he didn’t qualify,” Mentone asserted, stating that it was impossible that she had lost any of his petitioning papers and repeating that he had turned in a high percentage of signatures that did not meet legal guidelines.
Two candidates who originally petitioned independently of the two slates to seek primary ballot slots for council seats — Oscar Bolanos for the Third District and Montrel Morrison for the Fifth — also failed to qualify. Bolanos would have needed 97 signatures to make it to the ballot; he received 72. Morrison fell short of his minimum requirement of 144 signatures by just four names.
There will not be a Republican primary. Democratic voters can find their polling location in the image above, and will have the chance to vote for their chosen candidates on Sept. 14.
This is certainly an unusual year but, as usual, we are so lucky in Hamden to have Registrars of Voters who are informed, experienced and above reproach. These days, when there is so much hostility directed towards election officials, I am really pleased that we can have complete and unreserved confidence in our Registrars and in their ability (and desire) to perform their tasks impeccably.
Ann M. Altman