Cedar Rapids school board candidate Kaitlin Byers will be on ballot

CEDAR RAPIDS — Kaitlin Byers is able to run for the Cedar Rapids school board after objections to her candidacy were rejected by a Cedar Rapids schools’ committee Thursday.

The committee members weighing the formal complaints about Byers’ nomination paperwork were school board President David Tominsky, school board member Nancy Humbles and Ryan Rydstrom, the school board secretary and the district’s chief of staff.

The committee — on the advice of Brett Nitzschke, an attorney with Ahlers & Cooney for the school district — found the two complaints to be insubstantial, allowing Byers’ name to be placed on the Nov. 7 general election ballot.

The deadline to submit challenges to nomination papers was Tuesday.

Byers works at Kiva Iowa, a microlending platform at NewBoCo, where Tominsky is chief relationship officer.

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Byers is running against the District 4 incumbent, Dexter Merschbrock. One of the objections to Byers’ nomination papers was submitted by Kasondra Tosino, Merschbrock’s sister.

“I was reluctant to file an objection of my own, and she offered to do it on my behalf,” Merschbrock said.

Merschbrock said he takes his work on the school board seriously, and believes he has stood up for students facing discrimination, for students and families experiencing poverty and for better working conditions for teachers and staff.

“I am proud of that record,” he said.

The other objection was submitted by Stacie Johnson, who is running for the Cedar Rapids school board’s District 1 seat against Tominsky, an incumbent.

Neither Tosino nor Johnson were at the committee meeting Thursday.

In Johnson’s letter to Rydstrom, the school board secretary, she stated Rydstrom had rejected her Cedar Rapids school board nomination paperwork Sept. 19 — the deadline for filing was Sept. 21 — for the following reasons:

“Had I not started over in collecting petition signatures after mine were initially rejected, I would not be a candidate for CRCSD, Director District 1,” Johnson wrote in her letter to Rydstrom. “As opposed to Kaitlin Marie Byers’ petitions, given the dates, it is obvious new signatures were not gathered after her original paperwork was initially rejected.”

Rydstrom, whose job it is to collect and validate school board candidate nomination papers, said he did not reject Byers’ or Johnson’s nomination paperwork.

“I would argue I did not officially reject it,” Rydstrom said during the committee meeting, but that he did confer with officials in the Linn County Auditor’s Office before accepting Johnson’s nomination paperwork.

Rydstrom is new to the position of board secretary, having begun the job July 1.

Johnson also claimed parts of the candidate header on Byers’ nomination paperwork — required by law to be filled out before prospective candidates accept signatures — appear to be written by Byers’ husband, based on handwriting comparisons, and “alterations appear to be made on each document,” among other things.

Tosino’s complaint made similar claims.

At the top of every nomination petition for non-partisan office in Iowa, candidates must fill out their name, office sought, county of residence, city of residence, type and date of election and answer the yes or no question about running to fill a vacancy that Johnson noted.

If any of that information is missing, the nomination petition must be rejected, according to the Iowa Secretary of State Office, which oversees elections in the state.

That information must be filled out on every page of a petition before anyone signs it. Nothing can be added to a petition header or a notarized affidavit if signatures are already on the page.

The notary seal

The notary seal on Byers’ nominating petition came from Portugal and was called into question by Joshua Nelson, an election support specialist with the Iowa Secretary of State Office.

In an email to Eric Loecher, a Linn County election systems administrator, Nelson said the petition was “notarized out of the country per that stamp. It doesn’t meet Iowa law because it does not list the jurisdiction that the notarial act took place. Also, Iowa law requires the notarization appear in English. The stamp is obviously not in English.”

Matt Warfield, the Linn County deputy auditor, said the matter “is a closed case” since no formal complaint was filed about the notary seal for the school board committee to consider Thursday.

“There was nothing nefarious,” he said, adding this was the first time the matter of an overseas notary seal has come up in Iowa.

Warfield said he spoke to Byers on Thursday, advising her not to do that again.

Byers told The Gazette she was visiting her brother in Portugal and “was informed that to file my paperwork, I needed the affidavit notarized. I tracked down the only notary in the city, who was happy to assist.”

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