Challenge against Green Party guv candidate to be dropped

The petition challenge against Green Party gubernatorial candidate Larry Gist will be withdrawn, according to lawyers for the plaintiff.

“We are going to file for dismissal this afternoon,” Rhonda Barnes of the law firm Perkins Coie Brown & Bain said June 15.

Barnes said they plan to drop the case against Gist after it turned out he has sufficient signatures to qualify.

Gist called the petition challenge “harassment.”

“Now we can get on with the campaign,” he said.

The challenge, filed by Geoffrey Esposito, had alleged that more than half of the 2,980 signatures that Gist submitted on May 26 were invalid.

He needed 1,231 to qualify for the ballot.