GOP’s sole treasurer candidate makes it on ballot

Just enough nominating signatures accepted by state judge to allow Castillo to run for post

The New Mexico Republican Party’s only candidate for state treasurer can stay on the ballot.

A state district judge in Santa Fe on Monday ruled that just enough of the nominating petition signatures filed by Arthur Castillo’s campaign are valid despite a lawsuit that led to many being thrown out on legal grounds.

The decision dims the prospect, at least for now, that Democratic incumbent Tim Eichenberg may coast to another four-year term without competition. And it is something of a change of fortune for a candidate who just a week earlier had said he might drop out of the race, fearing he would not be able to afford a lawyer to take on the case.

But the ordeal has proven somewhat symptomatic of the state GOP’s struggle to fill the ballot.

To get a spot on the June 5 primary election ballot, Castillo had to collect 1,288 signatures from Republicans around the state.

Castillo, the former chief financial officer at the State Treasurer’s Office and a relatively recently convert to the Republican Party, turned in 1,472 lines of signatures on filing day earlier this month.

Three voters represented by a lawyer who has worked for the state Democratic Party filed suit, initially challenging more than 200 of those signatures on various grounds, alleging, for example, that some of the signers were not registered as Republicans.

Castillo’s campaign conceded that about 140 of those signatures were invalid.

And by the time the case got to court last Friday, Castillo’s candidacy hinged on just a couple dozen signatures that would get him across the required threshold and dueling interpretations of a few words in the state’s election code.

The lawsuit, for example, challenged several pages of the nominating petition on which voters’ information — their name and address — had already been filled in, apparently using a computer. The voters only signed next to their name.

Gretchen Elsner, the lawyer representing the voters challenging Castillo, argued signers are supposed to fill in their name and address by hand and that the automatically filled petitions are void.

Elsner also objected to several signatures listing only a post office box for the signer, not their home address. The signers were registered to vote, but she argued they should list the address where they reside.

But these points tested a vague section of the law and Judge David K. Thomson dismissed the lawsuit on Monday.

Rejecting those arguments, Thomson wrote that there is no reason to disqualify a signature only because it is listed with a post office box.

Likewise, the judge wrote that he would not reject pages of petition

signatures where the signers’ addresses had already been filled in. The state Supreme Court has already decided that a signer leaving the address line blank altogether is not grounds to void a signature.

The lawsuit had also challenged some signatures because the signer appeared to have changed his or her party of registration at the same time the nominating petitions were circulating. That, Elsner argued, could mean that some voters switched from Democrat to Republican after signing Castillo’s petition. Thomson decided the court can only rely on how those voters were registered on filing day.

The decision left Castillo with 1,324 signatures that have not been disqualified — three dozen more than the minimum.