By: Diane Benjamin
I caught part of a video live stream on Facebook from the hearing of Bruce Meeks’ challenge to Diana Hauman’s petitions. It was enough to know the hearing was a lawyer’s game of procedures, not based on evidence.
The Bloomington Election Commission has a lawyer and so did Diana Hauman. Bruce Meeks did not. His challenge was based on case law pertaining to notaries not having the signatory swear or affirm the signatures on the document being notarized were signed in front of them. Hauman had four pages incorrectly completed, so it was obvious the notary didn’t require anything from the person who collected the signatures before notarizing the form.
The case was dismissed because Hauman’s lawyer claimed the evidence wasn’t properly presented – in other words like a lawyer would in a court of law.
The moral of this case is: Challenging petitions requires hiring a lawyer because everybody else is going to have one.
Illegal petitions, failure to comply with filing requirements, or just not taking the process seriously is immaterial to being on the ballot.
I’m sure the BEC was all too happy for an excuse to end this. They have looked incompetent through this whole thing. They need it all to go away or else people are really going to question why the McLean county election commission can’t take care of Bloomington as well and have the BEC abolished.
A guy without a lawyer is an automatic loser in these kinds of games.
According to the BEC, an independent agency, the only thing that matters is that the signature of the candidate is notarized. It doesn’t matter who filled out the petition forms, who collected the petition or if they are completed properly. Renner changed his tune as the process progressed from the challenge being “ridiculous” to “he collected so many signatures,” legitimate or not, even “if there was a challenge,” he would prevail. Such is the political process.
I wouldn’t consider any of this a waste of time. Yes, it’s true someone like Bruce has a loosing case without an attorney to play games with the other attorneys. But, what Bruce has done is to point out the sloppiness of Hauman’s, Painter’s and Renner’s petitions. Hauman’s were particularly bad. Several of the petitions in question were gathered by her husband David, a democratic precinct committeeman, go figure. I disagree with the premise that these people have a right to be on the ballot. They need to earn their place and Bruce is seeing to it that they do. Thanks Bruce and Kevin and others for holding these people accountable. At least somebody’s watching them.