The national NAACP has ordered new elections for Anne Arundel County director, acting on a complaint by defeated challenger Gerald Stansbury that key membership lists were wrongfully kept from his campaign.
At their national meeting in New York last weekend, NAACP officials informed incumbent director Jean Creek that a new election would be held next month, Ms. Creek said yesterday.
It is not clear whether the new election will be for director or for the entire leadership slate, she said.
Ms. Creek defeated Mr. Stansbury by 11 votes in November, beating back one of the stiffest challenges she had faced in her 18 years as director. Mr. Stansbury has been fighting for a new election since the day of his defeat.
In a complaint to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's national headquarters shortly after the election, Mr. Stansbury accused the local branch of withholding voter rolls until the night before the election.
"We contested the election because we have reason to believe the election would have come out differently if those irregularities had not occurred," he said. "This is good news for the entire county."
Even Ms. Creek said she was glad the election results were thrown out. The new campaign will give her a chance to reach voters she did not know about last fall, she said.
Although Ms. Creek never filed a formal complaint, she said yesterday that her campaign never learned of many new voters enlisted by Mr. Stansbury.
Instead of delivering his voter lists to the local branch, Mr. Stansbury dropped the names off in Baltimore, where workers were on furlough and no new membership lists were being processed, Ms. Creek said. The local branch never received the lists, she said, and she was never able to contact those new voters.
"I think it's fantastic," she said of the NAACP's decision. "No one had access to the total lists."
After the election, Mr. Stansbury said the membership lists the Creek campaign gave him were in "a shambles" and were delivered too late to be of any use to him. He asked the national NAACP to determine whether Ms. Creek violated any bylaws by not releasing the membership lists earlier.
Ms. Creek denies keeping any information from Mr. Stansbury and has said that he could have picked up complete membership lists from election supervisors at any point during the campaign.
Ms. Creek said the national NAACP ordered new elections in Anne Arundel County and in other branch offices.
Both candidates said they had not received formal letters from the national headquarters outlining details of the new elections. Efforts to reach William Penn, director of branch chapters for the NAACP, were unsuccessful yesterday.
The new election is likely to reopen wounds from last fall's fierce campaign.
At that time, both candidates summoned supervisors from the NAACP's national office in Baltimore to oversee the election.
During the campaign, Ms. Creek claimed Mr. Stansbury had been put up for the post by black Democratic politicians who hoped to use the NAACP to enhance their local power.
Mr. Stansbury alleged that Ms. Creek was virtually invisible as leader of the NAACP and had let the group assume a low profile on issues such as crime and racial discrimination.