AZ Candidate Who Changed His Name To ‘Cesar Chavez’ Thrown Off Ballot

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The Arizona congressional candidate who changed his name to Cesar Chavez and switched to the Democratic party was thrown off the ballot by a judge on Tuesday, according to Fusion.

Chavez was removed from the ballot because 700 of his nomination petition signatures were invalid.

He was sued by Alejandro Chavez, who charged that the candidate misled voters by filing to run for the seat before switching his party affiliation from Republican to Democrat. The lawsuit also contended that any signatures collected before he switched parties are invalid.

The judge dismissed the parts of the lawsuit that charged that Cesar Chavez missed the deadline to register as a Democrat and the complaint that he purposely misled voters was dropped.

The candidate now known as Cesar Chavez ran as a Republican under his given name, Scott Fistler, in 2012 for the same seat in Arizona’s heavily Hispanic 7th congressional district.

Image via 12 News and The Arizona Republic

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  1. Thom Tillis is that you?

  2. WOT?! A judge ruled according to the spirit of the law rather than the letter? In AZ?! Holy carp, first I start this day giving props to FL cops for preventing a spree-killing without using either racial profiling or waiting for a “stand your ground” defense, and then I end this day by admiring an AZ judge for ruling in favor of Justice over politics.

    My world is wrecked. Must go outside now.

  3. 700 of his nomination petition signatures were invalid.

    Isn’t that like voter fraud?

  4. Before you go, today Obama pushed thru three important federal judges in FL, Il and WA. All minorities and two from the LBGT community.

  5. I know someone who works for a firm with quite a niche specialty, signature analysis. She told me they do a LOT of work for the county concerning falsified signatures on nominating petitions and ballot proposition petitions. Recently we were at a party and she asked me to attempt to sign false signatures to a fake petition for a class she was teaching. It is HARD to try to sign someone else’s name and have it look legit/not like it came from the same person. People who engage in this shit are blithering idiots if they think the county doesn’t actually look at the signatures (actually they sample them, only looking at individual petitions one-by-one if the sample indicates fraud). And, you don’t need to be a signature analyst to spot many cases of it because when you try to sign a signature intentionally that doesn’t look like your own, you do it s-l-o-w-l-y and the lack of fluidity is jarring.

    She also told me that many of the cases come from paid petition circulators, but you also get a few from candidates trying to get on the ballot. It’s a felony and it gets prosecuted.

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