Enough Already

While the Marc Holtzman for governor campaign touts a Denver Post article that says a judge has placed their candidate’s name on the ballot, they probably won’t bring too much attention to the rest of the story: one-half of Holtzman’s legal team confesses the narrow chances of finding enough signatures to qualify his candidacy. Here’s the long and the short of it:

…[B]ecause the ballot-certification deadline was Friday, a judge ordered that Holtzman be placed on the ballot in case his appeal is successful. If it’s not, the judge said, his votes simply won’t be counted.

Despite all its bluster, does it sound like the Holtzman campaign is really confident about its chances? Or do you sense more of an air of desperation?:

[John] Head, one of the Denver attorneys representing Holtzman in the lawsuit, said the campaign believes it has 1,541 valid signatures in the 1st Congressional District and 1,513 valid signatures in the 7th Congressional District – about 500 fewer than Head believed Holtzman had Friday.

Head also was concerned when The Denver Post pointed out that some of the names in a court document filed Friday do not match rejected signatures provided by the secretary of state.

For example, Carla Johnston and James Johnston both appear in Exhibit E of the filing but are not in a list of rejected signatures. James Williams appears 18 times at five different addresses in the Holtzman exhibit, but there is no James Williams on the secretary of state’s list.

“You raised questions about it,” he said. “I need to verify if we operated under some faulty logic, and it doesn’t hold up.” [Emphasis added]

And this little factoid:

The Denver Post could not systematically verify the Holtzman campaign’s filing because the campaign declined to provide an electronic version of the exhibits. [Emphasis added]

And last but not least, the piece de resistance:

Head said the campaign has hired private investigators and is using databases to further narrow the signatures to confirm they are registered voters living in the two districts. [Emphasis added]

Mismatched signatures? Keeping their exhibits from the public eye? Hiring private investigators? I’ve said before, and I’ll say it again: this campaign is hanging on by the narrowest of fraying threads, exhibiting greater and greater desperation, and is well against the odds of finding enough valid signatures to get on the ballot. Even if the near-miraculous feat of validating Holtzman’s candidacy is achieved, it has to be apparent to any open-eyed observer that he cannot win the Republican primary. At this point, he can only serve to divide the party and squander its resources going into an important election this fall.

But the Holtzman team has resisted any chance to take the gracious and reasonable approach. How many more legal challenges do they plan to make? If the judge finds an insufficient number of signatures to qualify his candidacy, will they do the right thing then? I fear rejection as high as the Colorado Supreme Court wouldn’t be enough for them.

Sigh… enough already.