ANNAPOLIS (AP) — State election officials notified the Court of Appeals yesterday that they do not have time before the Sept. 12 primary election to remove Tom Perez from the ballot as a Democratic candidate for attorney general.
The State Board of Elections filed a motion asking the court to allow Mr. Perez’s name to stay on the ballot, with notices posted prominently in polling places that he is not eligible to serve as attorney general and that ballots cast for him will not be counted.
The state’s highest court tossed Mr. Perez off the ballot Friday, saying he had not met the qualification that candidates for attorney general must have practiced law in Maryland for 10 years. Mr. Perez has lived in Montgomery County more than 10 years, but most of his legal work has been done in the District for the federal government.
“There simply is not time in the 15 days remaining before the election for the 24 local boards of election to prepare an entirely new ballot,” said Linda H. Lamone, state elections laws administrator.
The state has about 19,000 electronic voting machines in about 1,700 polling places, and almost all of them have already been tested and sealed for security purposes, officials said. In addition, at least 250,000 paper ballots have been printed and will be used as absentee ballots and as provisional ballots for voters whose names do not show up on the list of registered voters in the precincts where they are voting.
In the request for a modified order that was filed with the appeals court, the State Board of Elections laid out a whole range or problems resulting from the court’s late decision to strike Mr. Perez’s name from the ballot, including preparing all new data memory cards for its 19,000 machines, posting the ballots in local boards, retesting all machines for security purposes and resealing them with security tape.
The 250,000 absentee and provisional ballots would have to be reprinted without Mr. Perez’s name. The company that did the printing notified the board that under the most optimistic scenario, new absentee ballots would not arrive until Election Day.
“It just cannot be done,” Mrs. Lamone said.
While election officials worried about complying with the court order, Stuart O. Simms and Douglas F. Gansler were adjusting to the radical change in the landscape brought about by removing Mr. Perez from the ballot.
Mr. Simms and his aides were contacting labor and progressive Democratic organizations that had endorsed Mr. Perez to try to get them to switch to Mr. Simms.
“I am very optimistic that almost all of the supporters and organizers of the Perez campaign are shifting to the Simms campaign,” said Larry Gibson, Mr. Simms’ campaign chairman.
Mike Morrill, a spokesman for Mr. Gansler, said the absence of Mr. Perez “does not change at all what the campaign is about.” But he said the campaign obviously will reach out to Perez supporters.
Early reaction from political observers was that the change would help Mr. Gansler because he will no longer have to compete with Mr. Perez in Montgomery County, where both men hold elective office — Mr. Gansler as state’s attorney and Mr. Perez as a county council member. Mr. Simms is a former state’s attorney in Baltimore and also was head of the state’s juvenile and adult prison systems.
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