Former Democratic state representative Jonathan Pelto failed to collect enough qualifying signatures to earn a spot on the November ballot, but that hasn't stopped him from running for governor.
“My sense is we went up to the gate, we shook the gate, we weren’t able to knock it down but that doesn’t mean it’s not important to say we’re here,” Pelto said during an interview Tuesday.
Pelto is running a write-in campaign for the state’s highest office and has registered with the Secretary of the State to receive votes.
Any Connecticut voter can write in a candidate for office, but the votes will only count if the candidate has registered prior to the election.
He says he wants to use his candidacy as a way to showcase issues that are the most important to him and to Connecticut residents who urged him to run.
“It’s a way to be pushing the envelope,” Pelto said. “It’s a way to be heard and so we’ve learned that we got to use every possible route you can against a system that doesn’t like to hear outsiders.”
Pelto says he’s received hundreds of messages and phone calls urging him to get into the race. The main issue most people have talked to him about is the role of the Common Core Standards in Connecticut public schools.
Politics
The standards were developed by governors several years ago and were adopted by nearly every state in the U.S. Pelto says the process by which they’ve been implemented has been anything but transparent.
“The Common Core, the standardized testing, the privatization of our schools, the fact that Gov. Malloy and his education commissioner basically lied to parents about their rights under the common core testing system,” Pelto said, listing his grievances.
Gov. Dan Malloy has continuously defended his record on the education.
Pelto and his running mate Ebony Murphy say their main goal is to keep issues that are important to them and their modest following in the forefront. They pledge to work long after the election to make that happen.
Pelto and Murphy will be getting the word out about their candidacy using a direct mail effort.
“Even if we can only use our limited resources, a subset of the electorate, it’s part of the process,” Pelto said.
