An attorney representing Republican presidential hopeful John Kasich told a courtroom Wednesday that the Ohio governor’s campaign did not submit enough valid signatures to meet Pennsylvania’s ballot requirements. But that doesn’t mean Kasich should be removed from the April 26 ballot, his attorney said.
Kasich’s attorney Lawrence Otter reportedly admitted that of the 2,184 signatures the governor’s campaign submitted to appear on the state’s ballot, 192 were not valid. Pennsylvania election laws require Republican and Democratic presidential candidates to submit 2,000 or more valid signatures to make it onto the ballot.
The discrepancy was first pointed out by Students for Rubio Chairman Nathaniel Rome on Feb. 23, the same day Kasich’s campaign filed its petition to be on the ballot. Rome submitted a challenge at the Commonwealth Court of Pennsylvania shortly after Kasich’s petition was filed, alleging that some signatures were invalid or fraudulent.
But, as Otter has chosen to argue, Rome’s appeal was submitted at 5:13 p.m., nearly 15 minutes after the Pennsylvania Department of State’s deadline for election cases to be filed. Otter also claims the appeal wasn’t time-stamped by the Commonwealth Court until after 6 p.m.
“Otter contends that in the sometimes precise world of state election code, a black-and-white 5 p.m. deadline for submitting nomination papers should also apply to the objections, which are required to be filed up to seven days later,” PennLive reported Wednesday evening.
John Bravacos, the brother of Rubio’s Pennsylvania campaign chairman, and the attorney representing Rome, pushed back against Otter’s claims with the argument that Pennsylvania does not have an hour-specific deadline for ballot challenges.
Local media reported that Judge Bonnie Leadbetter advised the plaintiff that Pennsylvania’s election code was developed before electronic filing and thus “it’s probably a good bet the legislature assumed [the State Department’s office] would be closed at 5 o’clock.”
A decision on the matter has yet to be reported, but the case itself presents a potential roadblock for Kasich’s campaign. The two-term governor’s path to the GOP nomination, or at the very least a contested convention, would require him to pull off a victory next Tuesday in his home state and in several states thereafter, including Pennsylvania.
Kasich himself has vowed to exit the 2016 race if he does not win Ohio, but if he does, and then fails to make it onto the ballot for Pennsylvania’s Republican primary, his momentum could end just as quickly as it came. Pennsylvania is set to vote along with four other states on April 26 and has a prize of 71 delegates.
