Irony or karma? She was campaigning on election integrity.
Source: International Business Times
A Republican candidate for lieutenant governor in Massachusetts has been thrown off the primary ballot after a state commission found that more than 1,200 of her nomination signatures were invalid, many of them allegedly forged.
Anne Manning Martin, a long-serving Peabody city councillor and corrections officer, was ruled ineligible for the 1 September Republican primary by the State Ballot Law Commission.
The commission concluded she fell short of the 10,000 certified signatures required after it struck 1,279 of her 10,692 submitted signatures, some allegedly copied from a voter list and others attributed to people who had died. Manning Martin denies any wrongdoing, has called the ruling ‘manifestly unjust,’ and is fighting it in court.
The allegations focus not on Manning Martin herself, but on a contractor she hired to collect signatures. According to the commission’s ruling and testimony, Joe Bronske, a Weymouth Republican town committee chair, allegedly obtained a list of voters from a database managed by the state Republican Party and used those names to forge signatures on nomination papers.