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Published Tuesday, August 03, 2010 in Local

Tompkins fails to qualify for ballot

By Sarah Fay Campbell

The Newnan Times-Herald

Voters in Georgia's 70th House district won't have the opportunity to vote for an independent candidate after all.

Cowetan Keith Tompkins originally had collected petition signatures and declared his intent to run as an independent candidate against State Rep. Lynn Smith, R-Newnan.

However, Tompkins announced on Saturday that the Georgia Secretary of State's Office said his nominating petition contained only 1,740 valid signatures.

"This puts us only 66 signatures short of the required 1,806 we needed for ballot access this November, and officially disqualifies me from this race," Tompkins said.

Independent and third party candidates had a week to qualify in July, and then had to submit their required nominating petitions. To get on the ballot, a petition must have the valid signatures of 5 percent of the voters who were registered in the district as of the last election.

Once the signatures are submitted, they are inspected by the secretary of state's office. Petitions are then sent to the voter registrars in each district to be checked for validity.

Tompkins' petition didn't make it back to Coweta.

"I have not seen any petitions," said Coweta Registrar Joan Hamilton.

Tompkins said he thinks part of the problem was that some signatures were on letter-sized paper while others were on legal-sized paper. "When you actually read the law about independent candidates, it clearly says it has to be on uniform paper," Tompkins said. There was also one page "where the notary missed it," he said.

Tompkins said he wasn't given details about why some signatures were disregarded. He said he turned in approximately 1,950 signatures.

"It is hard to say because they don't give you specific details," Tompkins said. "They send you a letter saying 'this is how many you have, this is how many you needed,'" he said. "It said, 'You only had 1,740, therefore this officially disqualifies you from the race.'"

Tompkins said he "wasn't necessarily running as an independent because I had any big quarrels with the Republican Party."

Instead, "by the time I decided to run, it was so close to the primaries, I didn't think I would have enough time to spread my campaign issues," he said.

Georgia's ballot access barriers are "pretty difficult ... to overcome," Tompkins said. "It is by no means impossible to do," he said, but when someone is signing your petition, "you don't know if they are a registered voter or not. You can ask them, but you're relying on the honor system," he said.

Many third-party representatives say that Georgia has one of the most, if not the most, restrictive ballot access laws in the country, Tompkins said.

"I think in a race like mine, another two weeks and we would have certainly had enough signatures to be on the ballot," Tompkins said. But candidates for statewide races have to get tens of thousands of signatures. "It just becomes very, very difficult for those individuals," Tompkins added.

The drive might not have been successful, but "it was certainly a lot of fun," Tompkins said. "I literally met a couple of thousand people that I previously hadn't met in the community." He had some "very interesting conversations."

And it was exciting that hardly anyone refused to sign the petition.

He noticed a "huge anti-incumbent sentiment" while talking to people. Though he doesn't necessarily agree with it, "a lot of people just want their government back," he said. And a lot of people "are very frustrated with the two-party system."

He said he heard "over and over again" that people would like to see some kind of term limits on the state level.

Tompkins got most of his signatures by going door to door. "Nobody outright slammed a door in my face," he said. Once people realized "I wasn't a sales guy standing at their front door, they were quite nice," he said. "People were always offering drinks to me, and many people even invited me inside their house. We have a very good community here in Newnan."

"If I got nothing else out of it, I did drop about 30 pounds from being out in the sun and sweating so much," he joked.

Tompkins wasn't the only independent candidate in Georgia who didn't make it through the final stages of the ballot access process.

After the petition filing deadline of July 13, there were eight independent candidates listed as qualified on the Georgia Secretary of State's Web site. One of those was an incumbent.

On Monday, there were only four still listed as qualified independents.