After 11th-hour sprint, Tonya Sweat says she secured enough signatures to challenge Braveboy

Aspiring Prince George’s County executive candidate Tonya Sweat and her team were sent scrambling Monday after learning just hours before a key filing deadline that they didn’t have enough signatures to appear on general election ballots in November.

Sweat, who is seeking to run as an unaffiliated candidate against County Executive Aisha Braveboy, a Democrat, said about 20 campaign volunteers fanned out across the county to collect the 143 remaining signatures, plus dozens more.

She submitted them to the county elections board with less than an hour before the filing deadline.

“I have some warriors on this team,” Sweat said in a phone interview Monday.

Local candidates not affiliated with a political party must submit a petition with signatures from at least 1% of eligible voters in the district they are seeking to represent.

The deadline to file these signatures with the county elections board was Monday at 5 p.m. Elections officials then began a signature verification process.

Sweat, a consultant and community advocate, announced Sunday night that she and her team had secured signatures from more than 6,300 registered voters in the county, which she believed was the minimum required to appear on ballots in November.

She announced plans for campaign volunteers and supporters to accompany her in filing the signatures and other paperwork with the county elections board Monday, and she invited members of the media to attend.

But shortly after Sweat handed in her materials at about 10 a.m., she learned she was short 143 signatures.

Sweat said her team wasn’t fazed.

“They looked at me and said, ‘Sweat, we’re gonna go get them. If they want more, we’ll bring you more,’” she said.

Sweat said she returned to the elections board headquarters at about 4:15 p.m. with an additional 215 signatures.

She said she initially submitted roughly 6,300 signatures because she believed that voters who were registered but inactive didn’t factor into the total number of eligible voters in the county.

Based on her assumption, Sweat would have needed at least 6,271 signatures, according to February data from the Prince George’s County Board of Elections.

But Wendy Honesty-Bey, the county’s elections administrator, said state law includes inactive voters in the tally that determines how many petition signatures candidates must collect.

That means Sweat needed at least 6,531 signatures, which is 1% of the total number of registered voters in the county, active and inactive, as of Jan. 1.

If an inactive voter signs a candidate’s petition, the elections board is required to count the signature and change the voter’s status to “active,” Honesty-Bey wrote in an email to The Banner.

She added that the board emailed Sweat in early June to notify her that she would need at least 6,531 signatures.