Nate Curtis after announcing his bid for mayor last spring.
Summarizing the complexity of a court hearing—or, as the case was this week, three hearings pertaining to the weedy backwater of municipal election law—is a losing game. There are circuitous spells of document dissection, and there are moments of heightened emotion. Reducing it all to one story can feel like stuffing a crab into a contact lens case.
But this week’s series of hearings, which concluded this morning around 11 a.m., when the independent candidate Nate Curtis finished his closing arguments, can be simplified to two important questions.
The first is how independent candidates should interpret election law. All three hearings, before Judge Bernard L. Coates, Jr., were occasioned by petitions that sought to remove an independent candidate from the ballot. Two of the candidates, Nate Curtis and Nevin Mindlin, are running for mayor, and one, Jennifer Smallwood, is running for city controller.
The petitions hinge on a section left blank in the candidates’ nominating papers. (The petition against Curtis also charges that he fails to meet a residency requirement; Curtis disputes whether Harrisburg actually has one.) The challenges concern a section towards the top of each paper, labeled Section C, in which the candidate must designate something known as a Committee to Fill Vacancies.
At first brush, the case against all three candidates is damning. The paper begins with a clear instruction (“NOTE: You must fill in all information in A, B & C before you begin collecting for signatures”), and all three candidates left the section blank. What complicates the challenges is that the guidance available to the candidates—in the form of the state’s guidelines on running for office, assistance from the county Bureau of Elections, as well as the nominating paper itself—are deeply ambiguous.
Most of the confusion centered on the term “political body.” Near the top of the nominating paper, there’s a blank where the candidate must identify the political body with which they’re affiliated. The paper’s preamble also states that by signing the document, electors nominate the candidate as “representing the political body named herein.”
So what is a political body? It appears that the term is meant to suggest an informal political organization, but it isn’t clear. The state guidelines, after defining statewide and countywide political parties, explain in a separate section that a political body is “any party or body that does not qualify as a political party, as defined in the preceding section.” But this hardly settles things, because in the “political party” definitions, the term “body” is also used. (The definition for “statewide political party,” for instance, begins with the phrase “any party or political body.”)
In the hearings, these definitions were the source of bewildering exchanges. For instance, Ronald Katzman, the attorney representing the plaintiff challenging Mindlin, tried to suggest that Mindlin himself should be construed as a political body. “He looks like a body to me,” he quipped.
The Curtis hearing included a similar exchange. Curtis, who had listed “Curtis for Mayor” in the space for “political body,” explained that his was a “party of one,” and as a result he didn’t think he needed to fill in Section C.
“I’m certain all of my signers were under the thought that if I died or withdrew, there would be no one to replace me,” he said. When the plaintiffs’ attorney, Scott Caulfield, asked why he believed that, Curtis replied that it was “common sense.”
Caulfield’s efforts at semantics were abortive; when he tried to question Curtis’s common sense (“Are there other people named Curtis in the city of Harrisburg?”) the judge practically rolled his eyes. Katzman’s line, which produced a groan from the gallery, was equally confounding. His own oral argument relied on a quote from a previous case, which stated that the requirement of a Committee to Fill Vacancies “indicates a candidate is backed by a political body and is a serious candidate.” Following his own logic—that the candidate himself is a political body—what becomes of this formulation? “A political body is backed by a political body and is a serious political body”?
In any case, the litigators’ language games obscured the actual problem at issue. The fact is that the state’s election code poorly accommodates candidates outside the party system. It assumes that candidates without party affiliations will nonetheless attach themselves to smaller bodies; what the hearings show is that, especially for local elections, this isn’t the case.
The second, more general question the hearings raised is how difficult running for office ought to be. Herschel Lock, Mindlin’s attorney, argued that the goal of the election code “is to encourage people to vote and run for office, as opposed to discourage them.” Neither Katzman nor Caulfield addressed this directly, though it’s possible to guess their views. One of the things they both asked over and over was whether the candidates had sought the help of an attorney. They seemed to imply that obtaining legal counsel was a perfectly acceptable burden in a local campaign.
Perhaps it’s not surprising that lawyers would assume that what the election needed was the involvement of more lawyers. The impulse behind the petitions—what benefit they were expected to confer—was concealed behind a veritable attorney wall. It might be that the plaintiffs had noble intentions, but we don’t know, because they aren’t speaking. Coles, though present at Monday’s hearing, refused to talk to the press, and the plaintiffs against Curtis, Autumn Cooper and Joseph Lahr, didn’t even show up.
At any rate, whatever the petitions’ original aims, by now they have surely backfired. This was true in the case of Mindlin and Smallwood, who were already relatively well known in city politics, and whose hearings gave rise to suspicions of dirty campaigning. (The primary suspect is the Democratic candidate Eric Papenfuse, whose disappointing lack of comment on the petitions I discussed in Monday’s column.)
But it was especially true in the case of Nate Curtis, who until today was almost a complete unknown. By the end of the hearing, Curtis, who acted as his own attorney, had become a cause célèbre. He was courteous, organized, and earnest, both in his testimony and in his questioning. His witnesses—a realtor, a voter, and his father-in-law—helped shape a compelling narrative: a young veteran, with a sincere interest in working for his hometown, insisted on locating in the city over the advice of his elders and ran his own door-to-door campaign. He even earned praise from Judge Coates, who at one point told Curtis he had behaved “more professionally than some of the other attorneys in these hearings.”
A ruling is expected by late tomorrow or Friday, but it’s far from clear how Coates will rule. By the close of Wednesday’s hearing, it seemed possible he was ready to reject all three petitions. He hinted more than once at his distaste for Caulfield’s minute belaboring of the law. (“The horse is almost dead, Mr. Caulfield,” he said after a particularly exhausting exchange.)
If he does, he would do more than keep the candidates on the ballot. He would also signal to future plaintiffs not to abuse the law, which was intended to prevent fraud and corruption, not preemptively shut down debate.
After all, there is already a process for invalidating candidates. It’s called voting. And it’s a process the electorate would like to trust by the time it arrives in November.
