Republicans Seek Disqualification Of Winning School Board Candidate

FAIRFAX COUNTY, VA — Republicans are once again asking the Fairfax County Circuit Court to order election officials to invalidate ballot petitions of Marcia St. John-Cunning, the Democratic-endorsed candidate who won Tuesday’s election to represent the Franconia District on the Fairfax County School Board.

The Eighth Congressional District Republican Committee contends that St. John-Cunning should be disqualified from the election and not be allowed to be seated as a new school board member over an issue connected to the same person signing her ballot petition twice on the same day in February.

In Tuesday's election, St. John-Cunning won the Franconia District school board election with 61.33 percent of the votes against Kevin Pinkney, her Republican-endorsed opponent, who received 33.38 percent of the votes.

“Republicans knew they couldn’t win the Franconia District board seat, so they have resorted to frivolous, expensive litigation," St. John-Cunning said in a statement Friday. "Franconia District voters deserve their constitutional right to vote and for every vote to count. On Tuesday, I won the Franconia School Board seat by more than a two-to-one margin. Kevin Pinkney lost on ideas, so now he is arguing about process.”

The Eighth Congressional District Republican Committee's motion, filed with the court on Monday, follows a ruling by a Fairfax County Circuit Court on Nov. 1 that St. John-Cunning, who had been disqualified from the ballot a week earlier, could be reinstated to the ballot for the Nov. 7 general election.

In its motion on Monday, the Eighth Congressional District Republican Committee argued that St. John-Cunning testified under oath at an Oct. 31 hearing that she had not witnessed the two pages that the same person had signed, even though she signed a “circulator affidavit” on those two pages, a section that appears on a candidate’s ballot petition.

The Republicans said they want the court to “reconsider its conclusion that the Registrar has discretion to accept as valid, and to refrain from invalidating, petition signatures that were not witnessed by the petition circulator.”

The two ballot petition pages with the same person’s name contained a total of 21 signatures that the Fairfax County Registrar deemed valid, according to the motion.

“The invalidation of petition pages #1 and #3 with the admittedly false affidavits will decrease by 21 the number of valid signatures, from 131 to 110, and Ms. St. John-Cunning will only have 110 valid signatures instead of the 125 required to qualify for inclusion on the ballot,” the motion said.

In response to the motion, St. John-Cunning said the Republicans are wasting taxpayer-funded court time with "bogus lawsuits."

“In schools, educators model the behavior that we expect our students to emulate. This blatant attempt to nullify the election is not something that we’d tolerate from kindergartners,” she said.

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