Lawyer may cruise to victory in Navajo Co. contest
· July 18, 2008 · Print This Article
SHOW LOW — The race for the Navajo County Attorney’s Office may not be much of a race at all, now that one of the two challengers is asking a judge to remove his competitor’s name from the ballot.
The complaint stems from petition signatures that challenger Christian Ackerley, a Democrat, collected to get his name printed on the ballot. He needed at least 478 valid signatures from registered voters in the county to enter the race. Ackerley collected 814.
But the other challenger in the race, Democrat Brad Carlyon, claims otherwise. He is contesting the validity of 571 signatures which, if election officials agree with Carlyon, would ultimately spoil Ackerley’s chances.
Carlyon is currently the deputy attorney for Apache County. He and Ackerley are competing for a seat that was opened after incumbent Navajo County Attorney, Mel Bowers, did not seek re-election.
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Turns out Ackerley didn’t have enough signatures. He used felons to circulate his petitions (clients from his criminal defense practice). Nearly a third of the signatures were from people not registered to vote in Navajo County (guess that might happen when you pay people a dollar a signature to collect signatures for you). It also turns out that at least 20 of the signatures were forgeries.
You think Ackerley would have done things right if he was serious about running. Now he has to worry about an AG investigation into the petition fraud. Nice to have all the handwriting samples right there on the petition sheets.