Brady cleared for congressional ballot
Republican candidate Helen Brady will challenge U.S. Rep. Bill Keating this fall after all.
The state’s highest court ruled Monday that Brady is eligible for the ballot, overturning a decision from the State Ballot Law Commission that blocked her access based on how her campaign collected and submitted electronic nomination signatures.
Three days after hearing arguments in the case, the Supreme Judicial Court ordered Secretary of State William Galvin to print Brady’s name on the Sept. 1 Republican primary election ballot. Last month, following a complaint by registered Ninth Congressional District voter Leon Arthur Brathwaite II, the SBLC deemed Brady ineligible to run because a third-party vendor her campaign used to collect electronic signatures stored them in a separate file and then imported them into the final nomination paper document.
The commission ruled that process violated a requirement in an SJC decision outlining e-signature use that campaigns had to submit “native” documents onto which voters directly affixed their signatures.
However, the SJC disagreed with that interpretation of its own ruling.
In a brief two-page order, the court said that the process Brady used “complied in substance with the material requirements” of the so-called Goldstein ruling. A lengthier opinion outlining justices’ reasoning for vacating the SBLC decision was not available Monday.
Brady could not be reached for immediate comment on the decision Monday afternoon. It’s the third straight election cycle that she’s running — former Rep. Cory Atkins of Concord defeated Brady in 2016 and in 2018 Brady lost her statewide race to Auditor Suzanne Bump.
Her attorney, Christopher Kenney, had argued that blocking her from the ballot on the technical point would have violated her equal protection constitutional rights, noting that 39 other candidates — including several who qualified for the ballot — used the same company to collect signatures but did not face any consequences because their eligibility was not challenged.