On February 19, a California Superior Court Judge put Glendale School Board candidate Nayiri Nahabedian on the April 7 ballot. She had missed the deadline for filing her declaration of candidacy, because she had relied on erroneous information from election officials. See this story.
Ballot Access News
Edited By Richard Winger
She was or is an incumbent. That makes the difference. If she was an outsider, they would not have given her the time of day.
WHATEVER an election law bureaucrat does or does not do is meaningless.
The LAW is the LAW – esp. in YES/NO election flowcharts with DEADLINES.
I think that the city may have misinterpreted their own code.
1.08.030 says that if _an_ incumbent does not file by the deadline, then any person other than _the_ incumbent may file by an extended deadline.
Glendale holds at-large elections for the city council, school board, and community college board.
The only way to reconcile the use of indefinite and definite articles, is to read _the_ incumbent to be the person who had not filed.
The reason for such provisions is to avoid the situations where potential candidates don’t file because they are satisfied with the incumbent, or don’t think they can defeat the incumbent; and then the incumbent doesn’t file, and perhaps tells their hand-picked successor, who can file at the deadline.
If it were a single-member position, there would not have been any confusion. Nahabedian would have not filed by the regular deadline, and the deadline would have been extended for anyone but her.
It gets a little more complicated because two incumbents did not file before the regular deadline.
It is not implausible that an incumbent for such an office might not have filed, assuming that their colleague would continue to serve. Or they might not have filed because a strong challenger had filed.
What is not clear from the article is why Nahabedian was told on the 28th that she had until the 3rd. The filing deadline was the 29th, and there is no reason for the city clerk to anticipate any candidate not filing.
You didn’t understand the article. The non-incumbents did have the opportunity to file under the extended deadline after the other incumbent did not file.