Kanawha County residents voting by absentee ballot in November's general election will receive a different ballot in the mail this year.
A copy of a corrected ballot, which includes the Constitution Party's candidate for president, was being sent Friday to 152 absentee voters, Kanawha Clerk Vera McCormick said.
When a federal judge ruled Thursday that 17 independent candidates must be put back on the ballots in West Virginia, it was too late to re-print absentee ballots, McCormick said.
"Every vote on this ballot image will be recorded and counted according to state law," McCormick read from a letter she is including with each ballot to explain the change.
Chief U.S. District Judge Robert Chambers on Thursday ruled in favor of two minor-party candidates who filed a lawsuit Monday, claiming that their constitutional rights were violated when they were tossed off the ballot because of a state Supreme Court ruling that barred a registered Democrat from getting on the ballot as an independent.
Darrell Castle, a Tennessee man who is the Constitution Party's nominee for president, and Naomi Spencer Daly, a Cabell County resident running for the House of Delegates as a member of the Socialist Equality Party, filed their lawsuit Monday in federal court against West Virginia Secretary of State Natalie Tennant.
Following a decision in a case involving former state senator Erik Wells, in which the court ruled that Wells can't run as an independent candidate for Kanawha clerk, because he's a registered Democrat, Tennant informed 17 candidates that they were being taken off the ballot based on that case. Tennant and Wells are married.
Castle was the only candidate wrongly removed from Kanawha's ballot, McCormick said Friday.
The county's ballot commissioners approved of the change to absentee voting, said McCormick, who also added that Tennant approved of the letter being including to absentee voters with the updated ballot.
No Democrats filed for county clerk in this year's primary election, but after the primary, Wells used a procedure for independent candidates to try to get on the ballot.
Several other candidates, both Democrats and Republicans, had used the process to get on the ballot and had their efforts thwarted by the Supreme Court ruling.
Reach Kate White at kate.white@wvgazettemail.com, 304-348-1723 or follow @KateLWhite on Twitter.