Diedrich to stay on mayoral ballot

Mayoral candidate Carl Diedrich will stay on the ballot for the upcoming municipal elections, Pinal County Superior Court Judge Gilberto Figueroa ruled Tuesday.

“I feel great,” Diedrich said. “I just want to put it behind me, focus on issues and move forward now.”

In his judgment, Figueroa wrote that historically the courts have “weighed in favor of a liberal construction of the election laws in order to allow the greatest access possible to the election process to the public at large.”

Diedrich’s opponent, Christian Price, on Dec. 28 challenged Diedrich’s nomination petitions, claiming that 15 signatures were invalid and that Diedrich did not have the required 143 signatures. Diedrich had collected 148.

However, due to a calculation error made by the city and discovered after the lawsuit was filed, the court agreed with Diedrich that only 132 signatures — or 5 percent of the voters who had cast ballots in 2010 mayoral election — are required to run for mayor in the current election.

The city arrived at the 143 threshold by calculating 5 percent of the total votes cast in the last election.

Though five of the signatures on his ballot were thrown out by the court, Diedrich said he always believed he had met the 143 threshold.

Three signatures were thrown out because the signers were not registered voters, one signer was registered to vote, but did not live in the district where the mayor contest was being held and one woman had signed Diedrich’s petition twice. One of her signatures was thrown out.

“We felt confident through it all that we had done the best job we could,” he said. “This is not a contest to get the most signatures; it’s about qualifying for the ballot.”

Price said he filed his complaint as an individual voter and that the city had changed the rules in the middle of the game.

“They had 90 days to figure it out,” he said. “It had to go through the city attorney and city clerk’s office and, if it was known to be wrong , why didn’t anybody say anything?”

City Attorney Denis Fitzgibbons said the miscalculation on the required signatures was an innocent mistake on the part of the city.