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Third district candidate seeking new option to get her name on June Primary Ballot

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March 21st, 2018 by Ric Hanson

The Democrat in Iowa’s third congressional district whose 11th-hour effort to qualify for June’s Primary ballot fell short has a new strategy. Theresa Greenfield of Des Moines is hoping the seven dozen Democrats who serve on their party’s third district governing committee vote Monday to place her name in nomination. Greenfield and her campaign team say their reading of state law indicates it’s a way to get her name printed on the ballot.

“I am confident that a sense of fairness, doing what’s right is important to Democratic leadership and we’ll get this resolved on Monday,” Greenfield says. Iowa’s attorney general has declined to issue a legal opinion on Greenfield’s strategy. And the secretary of state’s office has not indicated whether it would accept Greenfield’s nomination next week. So why is Greenfield in this predicament? Greenfield’s campaign submitted petition signatures last Wednesday to the Secretary of State — paperwork required to qualify for the primary.

The next day Greenfield’s campaign manager admitted he forged some of the signatures. He was fired. Greenfield withdrew the tainted petitions and last Friday, Greenfield’s campaign raced through the 16 counties in the third district to collect the nearly 18-hundred petition signatures she needed by the Friday evening deadline. Greenfield got help from the campaign of a rival as well as the campaigns of three Democratic candidates for governor, but the effort fell about 300 signatures short.

“It’s like an old barn-raising kind of an event,” Greenfield says. “Now, it didn’t turn out the way we wanted, but the effort was spectacular and it also speaks volumes to people’s desire to let me have a chance on the ballot.” Democratic leaders in the third district are pondering whether to even meet Monday. Taking the action Greenfield seeks without the attorney general’s legal opinion could lead to expensive lawsuits for the Democratic Party. Greenfield had raised the most money among the field of Democratic candidates in the third district and she’d been featured by a national magazine profiling female congressional candidates before hitting last week’s stumbling block.

“I was not going to allow forged signatures to stand with my name on it,” Greenfield says. “…The folks here in the third district just learned who Theresa Greenfield is and the kind of decisions I’ll make as a leader in Washington, D.C. and that is (this): ‘I will choose to do what’s right.'” Greenfield could choose to run as a write-in candidate, but Greenfield told Radio Iowa she is not ready to discuss that option. Three other Democratic candidates in the third congressional district DID meet last Friday’s paperwork deadline to submit their names for the June Primary ballot. They are Cindy Axne, Pete D’Alessandro and Eddie J. Mauro (MAR-oh). All three are from the Des Moines area.

(Radio Iowa)