Is Cameron Ennis really through?

No-show at his own appeal hearing

By Will Collette

"Y'er OUT!"

First-time candidate Cameron Ennis of Charlestown made a whole bunch of rookie mistakes in his effort to mount an independent challenge to first-time incumbent state Senator Catherine Cool Rumsey.

Though he started off with a promising looking campaign website, he failed to pass the first key test all candidates must pass: gathering 100 valid voter signatures on his Nomination Papers.

Ennis apparently collected 100 signatures and apparently no more than that. And that was his first rookie mistake.

He then submitted all of them to the Charlestown Town Clerk, having apparently failed to read the instruction in the Secretary of State’s rule book. The rule is that signatures must be separated by town when you are running for an office that covers several municipalities, and those separate pages must be turned in to each Town Clerk in each town.

It’s all right there in the rule book which Ennis, a newly minted member of the RI Bar, should have read.

Senate District 34 includes not just Charlestown where Ennis lives, but Richmond, Hopkinton, Exeter and West Greenwich.

Ennis collected 49 valid signatures for Charlestown, but the rest were from other towns.

But even though he did not follow the rules, Ennis appealed to the Board of Elections for a do-over. 

He wanted his signatures from towns other than Charlestown to be counted and claimed it was Charlestown Town Clerk Amy Weinreich’s fault for not telling him that he screwed up his signature gathering.

Remarkably, the Board of Elections ruled in Ennis’s favor and granted him another 72 hours to get his signatures from Richmond, Hopkinton, Exeter and West Greenwich validated. 

Lots of other candidates – the ones who actually followed the rules – have a right to be pissed.

But at the end of the 72 hours, Ennis was still two votes short, having gotten only 98 valid signatures.

He had made another rookie mistake of failing to gather enough signatures to provide a cushion to cover those signatures that inevitably get invalidated. Most commonly, if a signer fails to sign the petition exactly the way they are registered, that signature is invalid. All of Charlestown’s other candidates, rookies and veterans alike, exceeded the minimum number of signatures required.

Ennis e-mailed me to say that he intended to appeal, even though his chances of success were slim, because his candidacy is somehow intended to strike a blow for Swamp Yankee Liberation. Here’s what he said:

“I just want those Providence boys to know they can't bully us swamp yankees.”

From Digging RI

I don’t know what that means. I don’t know who the “Providence boys” are, or how they are bullying South County’s swamp Yankees.

I also can’t figure out how Ennis’s misadventures – not reading the rules, not following the same rules as everyone else, not collecting enough signatures and blaming others for your own mistakes – advances the cause of Swamp Yankees.

Anyway, Ennis did file another appeal with the Board of Elections to try to overcome the disappointing 98 vote count. In his e-mail, he did not cite what grounds he intended to use to support his appeal. 

His hearing was to be held Monday, August 04, 2014.

Ennis was a no-show.

Whether he will continue to appeal – maybe by blaming something or someone else for his failure to appear or argue that Swamp Yankees don't follow no dang rules – or simply give it up, remains to be seen.