A Villager is pursuing a formal complaint with the state over a couple of “fake candidates” write-in candidacies for the Sumter County Commission.
This week, Villagers Pete Wahl and Jerry Prince quietly withdrew their write-in candidacies at the Sumter County Supervisor of Elections Office.
Wahl, a former district manager for The Villages, and Prince, head of The Villages Republican Club, in June had filed to run as write-in candidates in a blatant attempt to game the system for commission incumbents Don Burgess and Steve Printz. The write-in candidates’ entry into the race eliminated 45,000 Sumter County Democratic and No Party Affiliation voters from participating in the balloting in that contest.
Burgess, Printz and fellow incumbent Al Butler were trounced in the Aug. 18 GOP primary by a trio of challengers whose candidacies were fueled by constituents’ anger over a 25 percent tax increase approved last year by the Sumter County Commission. Many voters had switched their registration to Republican in order to vote against the trio of incumbents.
Villager Marsha Shearer, a well-known Democratic activist, this week contacted the general counsel for the Florida Department of State to update an earlier complaint filed over “corrupt interference with my right to vote.”
She said the abrupt withdrawal of Wahl and Prince from the race provides additional proof their candidacies were never sincere.
“If the write-in candidates had in fact been serious, valid, actual candidates for Board positions, they would not have withdrawn their candidacy within days of the Primary election. This is further evidence that their candidacy was not genuine, but instead was solely to prevent certain registered voters from exercising their right to vote,” Shearer wrote in the complaint.
She suggested that Wahl and Prince did not come up with the scheme by themselves.
“As alleged in my complaint, it seems clear to any objective observer that the two ‘fake candidates’ did not act on their own. Therefore, my original complaint filed against them, two of the incumbents on the Sumter Board of County Commissioners, and The Villages of Lake-Sumter, Inc. (and related companies and individuals) stands as submitted,” she wrote to the state office in Tallahassee.
Even though the “fake candidates’” efforts were a clear failure, Shearer isn’t letting it go.
“The fact that the Republican Primary has come and gone does not alter the fact that it would appear that a violation of law occurred and should be prosecuted,” she wrote.