FRANCONIA, Va. — Marcia St. John-Cunning may have already won her school board race, but Republicans in Fairfax County are arguing her legitimacy as a candidate.
St. John-Cunning defeated GOP-backed candidate, Kevin Pinkney, in the Fairfax County Public Schools Board race for the Franconia District race with 61% of the votes. However, on the following day, the Eight Congressional District Republican Committee took her to court over a new motion.
“I did not have that full feeling of 'Oh, my gosh, I won!' because I knew that this was looming in the background,” St. John-Cunning told WUSA9.
Her supporters call the motion frivolous and a desperate attempt to remove her.
“The real frivolous action is thinking lack of care and lack of attention to detail qualifies someone to be responsible for $3.5 billion dollars of taxpayer money and responsible for the education of kids in Fairfax County,” said Nick Andersen of the Fairfax County Republican Committee.
Republicans are requesting the registrar to toss out two pages of her petition for candidacy because she failed to witness each signature, which they cited a Virginia code. If accepted, it would put her under the threshold of the required number of signatures to qualify.
The motion accuses her of violating election protocols based on a previous court testimony that she wasn’t intently observing each petition clipboard. It points to two pages with signatures from the same person.
“This is about strict application of the law and instances where candidates from across the county were held to the same standards,” said Nick Andersen of the Fairfax County Republican Committee. “We're talking about one person struggling to meet those same legal standards.”
“I saw every signature that was signed,” St. John-Cunning told WUSA9. “They’re misrepresenting what I said. I witnessed every person signing.”
St. John-Cunning said she was seeking signatures not only for petitions to be on the ballot, but to be endorsed by the Fairfax County Democratic Committee. She believes the person may have signed twice as an accident and acknowledged it was early on in the process with many people at the event, including other candidates with different petitions.
Supporters say having double signatures isn’t an anomaly. The registrar ultimately vets and accepts the signatures.
This is the second attempt by Fairfax GOP to disqualify St. John Cunning. She was initially disqualified because she incorrectly wrote the wrong address in one of the 13 petition forms she used to apply. The mistake meant some of the signatures didn’t count.
In court, St. John-Cunning argued she received two more pages of signatures before the deadline, but the elections office told her it wasn’t necessary to submit.
A circuit court judge approved those additional signatures saying, “The registrar should not have, in any way, discouraged the candidate from filing them.”