Bethea Opens Headquarters
Mayoral candidate Alex Bethea will open his campaign headquarters on Thursday. The atlarge councilman will be holding a grand opening ceremony from 4 p.m. until 6 p.m. at his campaign headquarters located at 201 Mulberry Street. Bethea is also expected to receive some endorsements at the event.
NJ Weedman Misses Deadline
Apparently some of NJ Weedman’s pot minions were too high to make sure they got petitions in on time. A couple of Ed Forchion’s followers were turned away Monday when they showed up five minutes after the drop-dead 4 p.m. deadline to get petitions in to get on the ballot for the May mayoral election. The jailed Forchion, who has run for elected office in the past and is still fighting pot and witness tampering cases, only got 46 of the 390 needed petition signatures, girlfriend and campaign manager Debi Madaio said. She stopped by City Hall around 2 or 3 p.m. to drop of the ones she had. Apparently some of NJWeedman’s stoner-ites showed up around 4:05 p.m. after Madaio left and tried to turn in more petition signatures but were turned away, city clerk Dwayne Harris said.
NJ Weedman’s people turned around and “walked out of the door” without making a fuss. “That was extent of the conversation,” Harris said. Now the marijuana legalization activist, who has been involved in numerous skirmishes with the establishment, said in a jailhouse phone conversation that he punched out a lawsuit against the clerk for “obstructing” him from getting the ballot petitions. He expects the pro-se lawsuit he composed in the jail’s law library will be filed in court later this week. Harris said he hasn’t been “served with anything.”
The gist of the lawsuit, Forchion says, is Harris refused to mail him the petitions at the jail or provide them to supporters. That’s backed up by a Jan. 25 letter Harris wrote to the jailed pothead shared on Forchion’s Facebook page. It reads in part, “I will not mail petitions to you. You or your designated campaign manager may come into the office and pick up the petitions. I sent you the form to appoint your campaign manager which needs to be completed before I will release petitions to them on your behalf.” Forchion claims he asked for petitions as early as Dec. 18 and they weren’t provided to his camp until Feb. 22, or 11 days until the deadline. He contends he would have been able to meet the petition signature requirement if his followers had more time. “I don’t want to sound like a conspiracy nut, but this is what I’ve been going through for a while,” Forchion said. “Everyone hates NJ Weedman. I’m a pain in the butt. I thought I was a good guy. The evil guys are the ones winning.”
Forchion was already going back and forth with the clerk over whether he was eligible to run for mayor while locked up but not convicted of any charges. The Trentonian obtained a letter through a public records request that shows the clerk initially determined Forchion couldn’t run, citing state law that says, “No person shall have the right of suffrage – who is serving a sentence or is on parole or probation as the result of a conviction of any indictable offense under the laws of this or another state or the United States.” The clerk wrote Forchion was “ineligible to run as a mayoral candidate because Title 19 requires all candidates nominated by petition to be qualified voters in the state.” Harris admitted in another letter to the marijuana advocate that Forchion was “correct that any person who is a pretrial detainee does not lose the right to vote” and he could run for mayor.