Donna Frye’s Candidacy: Not legal?
Friday, October 22, 2004, 13:26 —by Joe Crawford
This item was posted in San Diego Politics category and has 4 Comments so far.
In one of our threads on Donna Frye, a Lawyer points to his blog post: Donna Frye’s Write-In Candidacy May Not Be Legal.
Interesting analysis. One would think that she wouldn’t be allowed to debate if her candidacy were against the City Charter.
If the analysis is true, I’d say that the Roberts and Murphy campaigns would refuse to put their men on against an illegal candidate.
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Jeff said on Friday, October 22, 2004, 14:57
I think the reason you are seeing Murphy and Roberts debating with Donna Frye, and otherwise treating her as a legitimate candidate, is that the City Clerk and Registrar of Voters are treating her as a qualified write-in candidate. I’m not the only one who has raised the issue, but neither the City nor the major media appear to be looking into it. Blogger Carl Luna (Political Lunacy) discussed the City Charter issue. His post “Will We Have To Rename Ocean Beach Palm Beach” is here. The San Diego Daily Transcript ran an article on October 14 on the issue of the inconsistency between the Charter and the Municipal Code. Unfortunately, the entire article is paid subscription only, and you can only read the intro paragraph without a subscription. Here is the link for those with a subscription.
Anonymous said on Saturday, October 23, 2004, 20:42
It seems like there are two key issues missing from this discussion:
1) Even if her candidacy isn’t legal, someone has to challenge it. I can’t image that either Roberts or Murphy would want to challenger her candidacy before the election. It would have a huge negative of an impact on their own campaign.
If Frye received the plurality of the vote, the second highest recipient of votes might consider challenging her legality as a candidate but this,if successful, would also cause a huge negative backlash and an immediate recall effort.
2) Assuming that a third party made the challege, a judge considering this would also have to consider that voiding her candidacy at this point would disinfranchise the voters who have already cast absentee ballots. It seems unlikely that a judge would rule in favor of such an anti-democratic action.
Jeff said on Monday, October 25, 2004, 7:12
I do not disagree with any of your comments. The entire situation is, in my opinion, lose-lose. It is a certainty that whoever wins will have a plurality, rather than majority, of the votes cast - and I would not be surprised if the winner ends up with about 40%. Regardless of her merits as a candidate, Donna Frye has done a disservice to the citizens of San Diego by ignoring the will of the citizens as expressed in the Charter they adopted.
kt said on Monday, October 25, 2004, 15:32
In the end I think Jeff raises a good point: we could have a real mess on our hands if Donna get a plurality. I suppose one thing someone at one of these debates might do is try to extract from Roberts and Murphy a public committment to 1) discourage any legal challenge if Donna wins & 2) refuse to serve if Donna gets a plurality. Now its probably true they won’t cough up such a committment but it sure would be useful to make them say something along the lines: “I think that if that happens the courts will have to sort it out.”