December 31, 2008
BY JIM LOCKWOOD
Star-Ledger Staff
Frankford residents thought they were going by the book when they started their most-recent effort to recall township Mayor Bob McDowell and Committeeman Paul Sutphen.
The residents got the recall-petition form right off the state Division of Elections website and submitted it to municipal clerk Louanne Cular, who on Dec. 18 approved the form. That was the first of various legal steps required in the lengthy recall process.
However, an eagle-eyed recall activist, Jesse Wolosky of Sparta, who has been helping the Frankford petitioners, spotted a problem with the state's three-page form: It stated each page containing signatures must be notarized, but only provided a notarization line on the final page.
The petitioners had been down this road before. A prior recall petition against McDowell was rejected in August by Cular because not all pages were sequentially numbered. In that case, the petitioners sued, but a judge last month dismissed the petition, ruling that it had been submitted too late to get on the Nov. 4, 2008 ballot.
This time, the petitioners alerted Cular about the apparent technicality, and she contacted the township attorney. He agreed that the state forms seemed flawed and probably would not hold up in court if challenged, Cular said.
"It appears the state form does not comply with the state statute," Cular said. "The state came up with a new recall form and that's what they (petitioners) submitted to me, so I approved it. But this form would be challenged in court, so we said, 'Let's start all over.'"
The petitioners and town officials agreed that a notarization line should be added and the petition forms resubmitted to Cular for approval, which was done yesterday, said petitioner Gary Larson.
"It's no different than last time, when we got blown out on a technicality. Luckily, it was spotted before we got started" collecting the 1,030 signatures needed per petition to force recall elections. "We're just trying to make sure we cover every base."
The state's form was indeed incorrect, and it was removed yesterday from the website after the division learned of it, said state Division of Elections director Bob Giles.
"They are correct. The notaries should be on every signature page," Giles said. "This was a draft version. It shouldn't have been out there."
Giles also noted that the state website usually contains a disclaimer that its forms are for informational purposes, and residents should obtain their own legal advice.
Larson said the recall process should be readily understandable to laymen and simpler to implement, and should not be prone to technicalities or require an attorney.
"A page that you print off from a state website -- that should be a done deal," Larson said.
