A city commissioner who’d planned to run for Stockton City Council won’t be added to the ballot after a judge dismissed the main argument in his lawsuit against election officials.
At San Joaquin County Superior Court on Friday, Judge Jayne Lee denied Shakeel “Sam” Carpenter’s request to force election officials to put him on the June 2 primary ballot despite the fact that the March 6 nomination deadline has passed.
In addition to his council aspirations, Carpenter is vice chair of Stockton’s salary-setting commission, which makes recommendations about how much the city should pay the mayor and councilmembers.
Carpenter didn’t immediately return a request for comment.
In a lawsuit filed March 12, Carpenter claimed that despite sending signatures of those supporting his candidacy to Stockton’s city clerk the morning of March 5, the day before the deadline, officials didn’t notify him until after business hours that he didn’t have enough valid signatures to run.
To qualify to run, candidates must gather between 10 and 25 signatures, Stockton’s city charter says.
Carpenter couldn’t provide additional signatures the following day, March 6, because City Hall was closed, he said in his lawsuit. City Hall is typically closed every other Friday.
In response, lawyers for the San Joaquin County Registrar of Voters’ and Stockton City Clerk’s offices argued in court that Carpenter had received plenty of notice the city would be closed March 6, because it was flagged prominently in instructions officials provided to candidates.
Officials also argued in court that putting Carpenter on the ballot so late would irreversibly disrupt the election process. Ballots were scheduled to be sent to print Friday.
While the judge didn’t rule on whether officials’ actions violated elections laws or the Constitution, she agreed with city and county officials that adding Carpenter would disrupt the race, she wrote in her order. That alone was enough to dismiss Carpenter’s argument, she said.
“The statute does not authorize the Court to grant relief that substantially interferes with the election even where that interference could be traceable to official misconduct,” Lee wrote.
Carpenter’s lawsuit is at least the third filed since 2024 against city and county election leaders claiming a candidate was wrongly disqualified from the ballot.
During the March 2024 primary, former Councilmember Ralph Lee White sued after officials allegedly informed him 25 minutes before the deadline that some signatures on his nomination petition were invalid. This month, a judge overruled city and county officials’ request to dismiss White’s latest complaint in the lawsuit, according to the judge’s order.
In 2024, Councilmember Mariela Ponce also sued election officials after they determined she wasn’t a registered voter, disqualifying her from running. A judge ordered Ponce to be put on the ballot, with the city’s former elections chief acknowledging that the initial decision about Ponce’s voter status was “inaccurate.”
While Carpenter cited White’s and Ponce’s lawsuits in court, their logic doesn’t apply in his case because decisions in those lawsuits occurred before the ballot deadline, the judge said in her order.