Councilwoman Belinda K. Conaway (D-7th), center, addresses supporters and the media at City Hall Plaza Tuesday morning. At right are her stepmother and father, Balto. City Register of Wills Mary W. Conaway, and the city's Circuit Court Clerk Frank M. Conaway Sr.; and far left, Leo W. Burroughs Jr., one of 15 steering committee coordinators. (VoB Photo/Alan Z. Forman)
COUNCILWOMAN CONAWAY
LAUNCHES UPHILL BATTLE
TO RECLAIM 7th DIST. SEAT
Make a wrong …Write
— Belinda Conaway
By Alan Z. Forman
Conventional political wisdom maintains that write-in campaigns virtually never succeed, that it’s next to impossible to get people to vote for anyone not already on the printed ballot, that odds are, most voters just won’t take the time or make the effort to write-in someone’s name.
However Baltimore City Councilwoman Belinda Conaway intends to buck those odds. In front of City Hall this morning she launched an admittedly uphill battle to hold onto her 7th District seat by asking voters to ignore the Democratic Party nominee who defeated her in the September 13 primary, and write her name in instead.
Conaway lost the hotly contested primary to challenger Nick Mosby by a margin of 653 votes out of a total 5,089 cast. The Republican nominee, Michael J. Bradley, who ran unopposed in the GOP primary, received just 86 votes.
Mosby and Bradley will be on the November 8 general election ballot. However Conaway, having lost the primary, will not; hence her write-in campaign. In most, if not all, elections in the United States, voters have the option of ignoring the listed candidates and writing-in the name of anyone they choose instead.
So on Tuesday morning the incumbent 7th District councilwoman told a gathering of nearly 50 supporters at City Hall Plaza — approximately 30 in her entourage plus another 20 onlookers — that the candidate who defeated her in September was merely the “front man” for an “unprecedented attack” against her that she said was “paid for and operated by forces from outside the district.”
FORCES LED BY GOVERNOR AND MAYOR
Those forces were led, according to her cousin, Corrogan R. Vaughn, and others who spoke following Conaway’s opening remarks, by Gov. Martin O’Malley — and by extension, Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, whom several of them termed the governor’s “puppet.”
“After all,” pointed out Leo W. Burroughs Jr., in an interview with Voice of Baltimore, “her chief of staff is Peter O’Malley, the governor’s brother. That ought to tell you something.”
Burroughs, a civil rights activist dating back to the 1950s and 60s, told the gathering it wasn’t right for Conaway to be “falsely charged” with not living in her district, especially, he maintained, when Baltimore’s major media regularly ignore the fact that 5th District Councilwoman Rochelle “Rikki” Spector “lives in her boyfriend’s condo in the Inner Harbor” and not in her Northwest Baltimore district where the law requires her to reside.
Burroughs, who told VoB he met Martin Luther King when King once visited Maryland, said he is one of about 15 “steering committee coordinators” for Conaway, adding that “she’s her own campaign manager; she’s too outspoken” to entrust that responsibility to anyone else.
“Nick Mosby’s primary campaign was the dirtiest campaign we have seen in Baltimore in years,” Conaway told supporters, but then let Mosby himself off the hook by declaring:
‘DON’T WANT INDEPENDENT VOICES’
“They didn’t conduct themselves this way out of malice towards me. They did this because the mayor, governor, and other powers-that-be don’t want any independent voices on the City Council.
“There is no room for dissent in ‘occupied Baltimore.’ As a member of the City Council, I have repeatedly taken independent stances.”
She also noted that “first, they tried to claim I didn’t live at my address,” asserting that “they circulated this falsehood through ‘bloggers,’ [but] after time, they couldn’t sell this lie any longer.
“The Baltimore Sun went so far as to visit my home when I was in session at the City Council,” she charged. “After they took a tour, the residency lie stopped.”
Local blogger Adam Meister charged on his “Charm City Current” blog that Conaway actually lived in Randallstown, causing the councilwoman to file a $21 million defamation lawsuit against him, which was later dropped.
The adverse publicity played a major role in Conaway’s defeat by Mosby, who hammered away at the residency charge throughout the campaign.
Immediately following the election, Conaway wrote to U.S. Attorney Rod Rosenstein asking him to prosecute Mosby, who she said was in violation of U.S. Code “by using the logo of the IRS on mass-mailed materials” that she says “falsely accused” her of lying to the Internal Revenue Service.
U.S. ATTORNEY RESPONDED TO LETTER
She told VoB Tuesday that Rosenstein “did respond” to her letter and that “there’s an investigation” underway.
Repeated attempts by Voice of Baltimore — by telephone and email, between Sunday and Tuesday — to elicit a response from Mosby went unanswered. His voicemail message declared: “Memory is full…. Please call again.”
“We are here today to reclaim our district and to begin the process of reclaiming our city,” Conaway told the gathering outside City Hall. “I am here to announce the kickoff of a write-in campaign.
“It will not be easy, but we must persevere, we must persist — and we must win,” she said.
“We cannot allow these dirty campaign tactics to take root in our community.”
She says in her campaign literature she wants to “Make a wrong …Write” and told VoB, “I don’t think it’s that difficult to get people to write-in” when they go to vote.
“If you can use a cellphone or an ATM,” she explained, “you can write-in.”
OTHER WRITE-IN CAMPAIGNS UNDERWAY
Other write-in campaigns are underway in the council’s 13th District, where former television reporter Shannon Sneed is challenging incumbent Councilman Warren Branch, who defeated her by 43 votes, 1776-1733, in the September primary; and in the 9th District, where two of the eight losing candidates are challenging incumbent William “Pete” Welch, who won handily, defeating his nearest rival, teacher Abigail Breiseth, by a margin of more than two-and-a-half to one.
Asked if she would join the bandwagon and mount a write-in challenge in the 9th, Breiseth told the Voice it would make no sense to “replay the primary” unless the losing candidates could “get together and agree on one challenger” to take on Welch, who, despite less than nine months’ incumbency obtained 35 percent of the total vote in a field of nine candidates.
Breiseth said she had been unable to get any of the challengers to reach agreement. She is now working as a volunteer for Sneed in the 13th District.
Losing candidates who demand recounts sometimes fare better. Election night tallies showed Branch trailing Sneed, for example, giving the impression the incumbent had lost; however when absentee ballots were counted, Branch prevailed, albeit by a small margin.
And several years ago, when former Councilman John L. Cain, who represented the 1st District from 1991-2004, lost reelection by several hundred votes and demanded a recount, it was revealed that a number of election officials had recorded incorrect numbers from the backs of voting machines.
Cain ended up winning that election.
CHARGED WITH ORCHESTRATING CAMPAIGN
Burroughs, Vaughn and others were united in charging that O’Malley and Rawlings-Blake had orchestrated Mosby’s campaign against Conaway. They spoke passionately about her being “targeted by the powers-that-be.”
Vaugn later told VoB that he plans to oppose Maryland’s junior U.S. Sen. Benjamin L. Cardin for the Democratic nomination in 2012, and that he stands for “people and principles over parties and politics.”
He wasn’t the only relative of the embattled councilwoman in attendance Tuesday. Conaway’s mother, Mary W. Conaway, the city’s register of wills, joined the gathering, as well as her father, Clerk of the Circuit Court for Baltimore City Frank M. Conaway Sr., who also lost in the September primary running for mayor, and who told VoB he believed his daughter had a good chance to pull off an upset in November.
Noting what he termed “the large drop-off” in voter turnout for general elections in Baltimore City, where the Democratic primary has been the election of record since 1936, he predicted the younger Conaway would get her supporters out in large enough numbers to win.
“If people follow through with what they’re promising,” he said, “she’ll win it hands down.”
alforman@voiceofbaltimore.org
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