This is the second time the Clerk has given bad info on petitions & deadlines in the past year or so, last time it hosed one of Fulop's proposals. Incompetence or something more nefarious? In JC it's such a tossup.

http://www.nj.com/hudson/index.ssf/20 ... nafu_at_hudson_count.html

Published: Tuesday, September 06, 2011, 7:37 PM Updated: Tuesday, September 06, 2011, 7:45 PM
By Terrence T. McDonald/The Jersey Journal The Jersey Journal

Candidates hoping to run this November for two vacant at-large seats on the Jersey City City Council were scrambling today after they learned the deadline to submit petitions was today, and not next week as they had originally been told.

Candidate Dan Levin, who ran unsuccessfully for mayor in 2009, said he received a phone call this afternoon from the Hudson County Clerk's Office informing him of the snafu and telling him to get in his petitions ASAP.

Levin, who said he had already collected more than the 100 needed signatures, told The Jersey Journal he rushed over to the county clerk's office and handed in about 150 signatures.

"I didn't want to take any chance that the deadline would hold," he said.

Levin and other candidates hoping to fill the vacancies said state statute requires the petitions be filed today. But the Hudson County Clerk's Office believed the deadline was next week.

The clerk's website still lists Sept. 13 as the deadline for filing petitions in November's special election, in which voters will choose successors for former council members Mariano Vega and Willie Flood. Nearly two dozens would-be candidates have expressed interest.

Vega resigned in September 2010 after pleading guilty to corruption charges. Flood resigned in February 2011, citing her failing health.

Several messages requesting comment were left at the county Clerk's Office. None were returned.

Board of Education member Sue Mack, another candidate hopeful, said today she knew the county had the wrong date, and always intended to hand in her petitions today.

"I looked at the statute for filing and the statute for filing says that the deadline is Sept. 6," she said, adding that she handed in about 500 signatures this afternoon.