Ruling to decide if write-ins will serve on Greene GOP committee
Officials from the Greene County Republican Party are requesting a court order to revoke the election certification for 33 write-in candidates in May’s primary election who they said lacked the votes necessary to be chosen as members of the Republican county committee.
Court of Common Pleas Judge Christopher Simms did not rule immediately on the request after a hearing Tuesday morning, saying he would spend the next several hours reviewing the statues and case law.
In their petition to the court, party officials Keith McClure and Clint Blaney said the 33 people had not received 10 or more write-in votes — a threshold based on the number of signatures required for a nomination petition for the committee seats.
They argued under state law, the write-in votes therefore constituted “irregular ballots,” and those people should not have been certified as winners by the election board.
McClure and Blaney’s motion asked the court to require the Greene County Elections Board to amend its certification of the May primary to reflect that the candidates did not get the required number of votes, and to “rescind and withdraw” any certificate of election for the candidates.
“To me, the vote total is the only evidentiary issue the court needs to resolve,” attorney John Headley, representing the county party, said during a hearing on the petition Tuesday.
Headley pointed to a 2018 ruling in which the state Court of Appeals upheld the Philadelphia County Democratic Party’s refusal to seat 11 write-in candidates on the committee.
Greene County agreed with the request to invalidate the ballots, but took a different route to the conclusion.
County Solicitor Eugene Grimm, who advised the elections office to count the votes, said the rules surrounding vote totals for primaries did not apply to the county committee races, as those were a final election for intra-party races.
Grimm said ultimately, the county parties have final say on whether a candidate is seated.
“I don’t like it personally, I think it’s undemocratic, but it’s the way our law is, and the way our system is,” he said.
Grimm invoked a 1978 case in which a judge affirmed Westmoreland County had properly certified a winner in a county committee race who won four of the five votes cast.
The county’s elections adviser, a longtime administrator in Westmoreland County’s elections office, had been familiar with the ruling, Grimm said.
The decision in the Westmoreland case was criticized in the court ruling cited by Headley, but had not been overturned.
Pennsylvania’s 67 counties have not settled on a uniform interpretation of the law, with some applying a 10-vote limit and others choosing one.
“Because it’s unsettled law, the County Board of Elections made a decision based on case law that I provided them,” Grimm said after the meeting. “They did not violate public trust or go against established procedure.”
Several of the write-in candidates had indicated to the county they did not wish to serve, Headley said.
Of the 33, the only one to show up at the hearing was Larry Yost of Dunkard Township, who argued he should be seated on the committee.
“If the people voted for a write-in candidate … they should have the option to sit on the committee,” he said. “Especially when there’s no representation of the township.”
Yost also argued party officials had refused to seat him due to personal conflicts; Headley rebutted that, pointing to the blanket treatment of candidates who got below 10 votes.
Simms said any claims not dealing with the vote totals and law relating to those were beyond the scope of Tuesday’s hearing.
Yost did not comment after the hearing on whether he would pursue legal action if the election is rescinded.
While Headley and Grimm argued for the Yost matter to be resolved separately from the 32 write-ins who did not object, Simms said he would issue a general ruling covering all of them.
“You’re either duly elected or not duly elected under the law,” he said.