Pennsylvania Senate Race Whittled Down

The time and money Republicans spent helping the Green Party field a U.S. Senate candidate may be a lost cause — unless Pennsylvania's highest court steps in and decides that he can compete against Republican Sen. Rick Santorum and Democratic state Treasurer Bob Casey.

Carl Romanelli, whose candidacy was backed by Santorum, is hoping the state Supreme Court will rule that state elections officials required him to gather far too many petition signatures to make the Nov. 7 ballot.

Commonwealth Court Judge James R. Kelley said during a hearing Monday that Romanelli, a railroad industry consultant from Wilkes-Barre, was 8,931 signatures shy of 67,070 he needed to qualify as a minor-party candidate.

Clifford Levine, an attorney for the Democrats, said the ruling "allows there to be a head-to-head matchup between Bob Casey and Rick Santorum, which is what obviously, in our view, Sen. Santorum was trying to avoid."

Romanelli has garnered about 5 percent in recent independent polls and campaign experts expect that the majority of those votes would go to Casey, which is precisely why Santorum and Republicans want Romanelli on the ballot, the Harrisburg Patriot-News said.

Romanelli did not attend Monday's hearing. In a statement issued later in the day, he said his fate would ultimately depend on the state Supreme Court determining how many signatures he needed to get on the ballot.

"The Democrats have a long way to go to get me off the ballot," Romanelli said.

The Democratic State Committee's lawsuit spawned a six-week review of tens of thousands of signatures. The lawsuit challenged about three-quarters of the 94,000 signatures Romanelli gathered, saying they included fake names, unregistered voters and illegible signatures.

Romanelli's lawyer had argued that many of the signatures were incorrectly invalidated because of problems with the state's computerized voter registry, but Kelley concluded that it was too late to take up that claim.

Kelley said during Monday's hearing he would grant the Democrats' request to set aside Romanelli's petition and would "quickly" issue an order and opinion.

Pennsylvania law requires minor-party and independent candidates to collect a number of signatures equal to 2 percent of the ballots cast for the largest vote-getter in the last statewide election. This year's threshold was based on Casey's record vote count in winning the treasurer's office in 2004, resulting in an unusually high number.

Lawrence Otter, Romanelli's lawyer, said he remained hopeful that the state Supreme Court would side with Romanelli in a challenge over how the signature threshold is determined.

Casey's campaign and the state Democratic Party have accused Santorum, the Senate's third-ranking Republican, of engineering Romanelli's candidacy. Romanelli's support for abortion rights was considered likely to take away votes that would have otherwise gone to Casey, since both Casey and Santorum oppose abortion rights.

"Instead of Rick Santorum having two names on the ballot, we can have Rick Santorum and Bob Casey," said Larry Smar, Casey's campaign spokesman.

Santorum called Kelley's ruling "a wrong decision."

"I don't think the court has treated Mr. Romanelli fairly," Santorum said. "It's very, very clear that these are partisan Democrat judges who are doing what the partisan Democrat thing is."

Romanelli has acknowledged that Republican contributors, including people who donated to Santorum, probably supplied most of the $100,000 that he said he spent gathering signatures to qualify.

An analysis showed that at least $29,000 came from donors who also have given to Santorum's campaign, and nearly all the donors had given to Republican candidates in recent elections.

Recent independent polls have given Casey a lead over Santorum, with differing margins.