Orman campaign remains confident he will stay on ballot in governor’s race despite Democrats’ objections

photo by: Associated Press

Kansas City-area businessman Greg Orman speaks to reporters after he and his running mate Sen. John Doll delivered more than 10,000 signatures to the Secretary of State's office in Topeka, Kan., Monday morning, Aug. 6, 2018, to formalize their campaign for governor. (Thad Allton/The Topeka Capital-Journal via AP)

TOPEKA – Independent gubernatorial candidate Greg Orman’s campaign said Tuesday that it was confident Orman’s name would appear on the Nov. 6 general election ballot, despite an effort by Democrats to exclude him.

“Absolutely, 100 percent confident,” Tim Phillips, Orman’s campaign manager, said in an interview Tuesday.

Orman, 49, a Johnson County businessman who ran unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate in 2014, submitted more than 10,000 petition signatures on Aug. 6 to place his name on this year’s ballot for governor as an independent candidate. That was a little more than twice the number required under Kansas law.

On Friday, Aug. 17, after county election officials finished verifying those signatures, the secretary of state’s office certified that Orman had met the legal requirement.

On Monday, though, attorney Will Lawrence, chief of staff to Kansas Senate Democratic Leader Anthony Hensley, of Topeka, sent a letter to the secretary of state’s office challenging the petitions, arguing among other things that seven counties did not finish verifying those signatures until Aug. 17, which was one day after the statutory deadline of 10 days after the submission of the petitions.

Those counties, Lawrence said, account for more than 6,000 of Orman’s signatures that should be declared invalid because they were not certified on time. He said those petitions should be invalidated, which would drop Orman’s signature total to well below the 5,000 needed.

Phillips, however, said the Orman campaign met its duty of gathering signatures and turning them in by the Aug. 6 deadline.

“And I guess to add to that, even if there were some bureaucratic foul-up, it would not justify removing people’s fundamental right to participate in the process,” he said.

Democrats, however, say there are more problems in the petitions than just the allegedly late certifications.

In a separate letter, Topeka attorney Pedro Irigonegaray said “a possible troubling pattern” of irregularities existed in the way many petition sheets were notarized. Notaries are supposed to verify the signature of the person circulating the petition.

He also said there were issues involving some of the people employed by an outside firm working on behalf of the Orman campaign to gather petition signatures.

Irigonegaray said there are examples of petition sheets that weren’t notarized for weeks after the petitions were signed by voters and that Orman submitted petition sheets that were never notarized at all.

He also noted that one signature gatherer is a convicted felon who is still on probation in Kansas and thus should be disqualified under Kansas law from circulating petitions.

Another, he said, appears to have gathered 1,004 signatures in a seven-day period from July 25 to July 31.

“If one assumes that he was working an 11-hour day, with no breaks for those 7 consecutive days, he would have had to collect a signature every 4.5 minutes to reach this number,” Irigonegaray wrote.

Phillips, however, said those do not add up to a good enough reason to remove a candidate from the ballot or to invalidate the will of those who signed the petitions.

Democrats are heading into the 2018 election cycle with more hope than they’ve had in nearly a decade. Since 2010, Republicans have won every election for statewide and congressional offices in Kansas.

This year, though, political handicappers are rating both the 2nd and 3rd congressional districts as toss-up races. And in governor’s races, Kansans have alternated evenly between Republican and Democratic administrations for about the last 50 years.

The Democratic nominee for governor is state Sen. Laura Kelly, 68, of Topeka. She will face Republican nominee Kris Kobach, 52, the current secretary of state.

Kelly is seen by most observers as a centrist Democrat in the mold of former Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, who was able to attract votes and support from independent and moderate Republican voters. Sebelius endorsed Kelly in the Democratic primary.

Kobach, by contrast, is seen as a firebrand conservative who has built a national profile crusading against illegal immigration. He is also the author of a state law that was recently overturned in federal court that required people to show proof of U.S. citizenship in order to register to vote.

Orman’s candidacy, however, is viewed by many as a potential threat to Democrats because he would most likely draw from the same pool of independent and moderate Republican voters that Kelly hopes to attract.

A super PAC tied to the Orman campaign, meanwhile, has been portraying Kelly and Kobach as “two peas in a pod” who both represent what Orman says is a failed two-party system.

“They both represent the established order – the duopoly, if you will – of people who feel as though they’ve had a monopoly on power for so long that it is their right, and who object to the people of Kansas having the ability to vote for whoever they might want to,” Phillips said. “And that’s the genesis of this bogus and frivolous filing.”

The challenge to Orman’s petitions will be heard by the state Objections Board, which is composed of the secretary of state, attorney general and lieutenant governor. That board is scheduled to meet at 9 a.m. Thursday in Topeka.

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