The Massachusetts attorney general, Andrea Joy Campbell, formally weighed in Monday on the effort to oust Winthrop Town Council member Max Tassinari, joining the state’s chief elections officer in telling the state’s Supreme Judicial Court that the persistent recall campaign has absolutely no ongoing legal merit.

After some hesitation and a brief reversal, Winthrop town officials concluded three weeks ago that the campaign against Mr Tassinari had failed to collect enough signatures of town voters to place a question on the November ballot to remove Mr Tassinari from office. But proponents of the recall effort pressed ahead with their claim that they didn’t need as many signatures as the town’s rules require, taking steps that included filing a lawsuit in the state court seeking an emergency declaration on their behalf.

The state attorney general on Monday submitted to the court the opinion of William Galvin, secretary of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and the state’s chief elections officer. It concluded that the committee formed to oust Mr Tassinari, largely over his position on a state housing law, appears to have offered no evidence whatsoever for its claim that it had collected enough signatures.

“Nowhere does the recall provision make any reference to the number of signatures required being linked to the votes cast at any particular election,” Mr Galvin told the court through the attorney general, in reference to the recall group’s chief claim. “The committee advances a wholly unsupported interpretation of the language that appears to be based on nothing other than the convenient result it would achieve for them.”

Mr Galvin also noted that whatever decision the court might eventually make, it now appears too late, because Tuesday is the legal deadline for the town to make any changes to the ballot for the November 4 general election.

The campaign against Mr Tassinari was created by a small group of town residents, led by Diana Viens and Sheryl Stracco Howard, who also have led opposition to the town’s compliance with a state law known as 3A that generally requires cities and towns around Boston to expand zones for multifamily housing. Winthrop could comply with the 3A law without actually adding housing in Winthrop, but several Town Council members have voted to deny that compliance, subjecting Winthrop to a loss of eligibility for several categories of state funding, as a way for the town to protest the state’s longstanding authority to regulate zoning.

State-imposed possibility

The state has held out the option of imposing its own compliance plan on recalcitrant towns, which in the case of Winthrop could have the ironic effect of actually adding new housing. The 3A compliance strategy drafted by town planners, and rejected by the overall Town Council, would grant multifamily housing status to parts of town that already have multifamily housing. A potential state-imposed compliance plan could instead rezone other parts of Winthrop, including granting multifamily status to locations where single-family houses currently exist.

The campaign against Mr Tassinari is the most advanced of several attempts by 3A opponents to oust Town Council members who disagree with their position of defiance, and it has led to some allegations of ethical misbehavior. In particular, Winthrop’s Board of Registrars of Voters attempted to force the recall vote against Mr Tassinari onto the November ballot by convening a meeting at which all three of the board’s appointed members sided with the anti-Tassinari campaign – without publicly acknowledging that those three members also were signers of the petition to get the Tassinari recall question placed on the November ballot.

The recall campaign needed to collect signatures from 20 percent of registered voters in Winthrop – or 2,863 people – to get the removal question included on the ballot. Ms Howard and other recall committee members repeatedly acknowledged that 2,863 figure in public discussions of their work and its goal. But after it collected slightly fewer than 2,000 signatures, Ms Viens argued that her committee actually only needed 882 signatures, representing 20 percent of voters in the most recent town election.

Mr Galvin and the attorney general, in their filing with the court, noted that the town’s bylaws clearly require the signatures of 20 percent of all registered voters, and said that the recall campaign cited no language anywhere backing the idea that the town’s rules referenced the number of voters in the town’s most recent elections.

The recall campaign instead argued that its supporters worked hard to collect the nearly 2,000 signatures that it did obtain, and it suggested that the recall question should therefore be allowed on the ballot out of respect for that level of effort.

That argument was advanced within the Town Council by at least one of its members, Suzanne Swope, who is also the mother of Ms Viens. In an email in mid-September to the Town Council’s president, Jim Letterie, Ms Swope forwarded a message from a lawyer backing the recall campaign, Frederick Bagley, in which Mr Bagley asserted that failing to allow the recall question on the November ballot “would undermine public trust, disenfranchise voters, and send a troubling message that the will of the people can be ignored,” before adding: “Please do the right thing: vote to place the recall question on the ballot, and allow the voters to decide at the polls, as our local democratic process intends.” To that message, Ms Swope added her own note to Mr Letterie, saying: “Please do the legal and right thing, Jim.”

Banging the F&$@! wall

In another message to Mr Letterie one day earlier, according to documents provided by the town under a public records request, Ms Swope pleaded with the Town Council president to grant the recall committee’s request on an emergency basis, adding: “The ballots need to be printed!!!!!!!”

Governments, however, generally require the signatures of substantial percentages of voters for recall campaigns to deter such efforts from being used outside of extraordinary circumstances of serious official misbehavior. And in Winthrop, the Town Council president has no assigned role in adjudicating such questions of recall campaigns if the voter signature requirement is not met.

Mr Galvin and the state attorney general noted in their filing to the court that the town’s Board of Registrars of Voters also has no role in settling such disputes. “The charter assigns them only the ministerial task of certifying the number of voter signatures on the petition once it is submitted to them by the town clerk,” Mr Galvin said in the opinion. The Board of Registrars, she said, “cited no legal basis for the board’s determination that it had jurisdiction or for the board’s order; presumably, that is because none exists.”

The Winthrop town attorney, Jim Cipoletta, had repeatedly pleaded with the Board of Registrars – whose chairman, Paul Reardon, is a candidate for Town Council in the November election – to not get involved in judging the Tassinari recall effort, because of its lack of authority in the matter.

During an extended exchange with state elections officials in September, Mr Cipoletta made clear that he understood their warnings that the law stood firmly on the side of the town clerk after the clerk rejected – in the second of two reversals – the bid to put the Tassinari recall question on the November ballot. “However, my authority is limited,” the town attorney told state elections officials in one email. “I can’t overcome internal competing agendas. I don’t make policy.”

Mr Cipoletta also described looking forward to the courts resolving the matter. “I’m most happy to let a judge settle this,” he told the state elections officials. “I can’t even think today through the pain of banging my head against the F&$@! wall.”