One indication of how badly they were stretching to file frivolous claims against us, was their charge that maybe John McLemore should be disqualified from signing our ballot argument, because we’d accidentally forgotten to check off the little checkbox on the signature form to indicate that he was signing as a registered voter in the county.

The law says that the signer need only be a registered voter in the juridiction (if they’re not signing for a bona fide organization or as a member of the governing entity that put the measure on the ballot)-not that they have to check off the right checkbox or else they’re disqualified. The Registrar’s Office had checked on the spot that all our signatories were registered voters in the county, when we submitted our arguments. She had also failed to notice that we’d forgotten to add the checkmark, but since she’d verified that he was a registered voter, it didn’t matter.

Now bear in mind that it’s not like John McLemore is an unknown quantity to Mike Burns or VTA or SVLG.  In fact, Mike Burns had served for four years on the Caltrain board concurrently with John McLemore, Burns as a rep from San Francisco when he was the head of Muni, and McLemore as a rep of the cities of Santa Clara County. You can see that they served on the Caltrain board at the same time in Exhibit P, when McLemore was vice-chair of the board. Our lawyer had McLemore sign this declaration about his qualifications.

If you want nitpicky, well—there was plenty to nitpick about our opponents’ signature pages too, if we’d wanted to go there.  Both Rod Diridon Sr. and Mike Honda signed and dated their authorization declaring that the rebuttal argument, “was true and correct to the best of his belief” on August 12, even though their rebuttal argument could not have possibly been written at that point. The rebuttals weren’t due until August 20. We didn’t submit our initial argument to the Registrar until August 13, and their rebuttal was clearly focused on trying to discredit the points that we made in our initial argument. And Chuck Reed signed as a governing board member, even though he didn’t use his VTA board member title in signing the argument (our opponents seem desperate to avoid any mention of VTA even in the signatures for the arguments for B).