Ann Arbor Clerk: Issa On Primary Ballot

On Monday, May 16, Ann Arbor city clerk Jackie Beaudry said that Marwan Issa will be a candidate in the Ward 3 city council Democratic primary on Aug. 2. As of last Tuesday, Issa had submitted only 94 valid signatures of the 100 that are needed to qualify on the ballot.

However, that total was based on a city clerk staff decision to disallow a sheet of 20 signatures submitted by Issa. Beaudry reversed that decision after discussing the issue with assistant city attorney Mary Fales and Issa himself.

The deadline for submitting nominating petitions was Tuesday, May 10, at 4 p.m. With that deadline minutes away, members of Issa’s family – standing at the window of the city clerk’s second floor offices – had pled the case with city clerk staff that a sheet containing 20 signatures should have been allowed to count. Clerk staff had based the decision to disqualify the sheet of signatures – from members of Issa’s family – based on a statement from Marwan Issa, who had circulated the signature sheet.

City clerk staff say that Issa told them he’d left the petition sheet at a house where several Issa family members live so that they could sign it. Staff had disallowed the sheet of signatures because it’s required that a petition circulator witness the signature of people signing the petition. A family member of Issa’s at the clerk’s office window on Tuesday afternoon felt that the circulator may have misunderstood the question asked of him by the clerk’s staff, saying that the sheet had been properly circulated. [.pdf of Michigan state election law, Act 116 of 1954]

On Monday, Beaudry wrote in an email to The Chronicle that “Mr. Issa informed us that he misunderstood Amanda’s [city clerk staff] question regarding the circulator certificate on the page in question, which included mostly family members’ signatures. He [Issa] informed us that he did not mean to indicate that he did not circulate the sheet personally. Given this information, I don’t have any other reason to assume the circulator sheet is not valid so we were able to verify and count 10 of the 20 signatures on that page. Those 10 signatures brought Mr. Issa over the required 100 signatures needed to qualify.”

Other Ward 3 Democratic candidates who submitted enough nominating signatures to qualify were incumbent Stephen Kunselman and Ingrid Ault. [They both graduated Pioneer High School in 1981. No word on whether the 30th reunion festivities will include campaign speeches.] The winner of the Democratic primary in Ward 3 will face Republican David Parker in November.