Republicans are appealing a ruling keeping Working Families Party candidates on the Philly City Council ballot

Philadelphia’s Republican Party on Wednesday appealed a judge’s ruling that kept City Councilmember Kendra Brooks and her Working Families Party running mate, Nicolas O’Rourke, on the November’s ballot.

The continuing legal dispute highlights the serious stakes as the progressive Working Families Party seeks to oust Republicans from at-large Council seats in GOP control for seven decades. Republicans lost one of those seats to Brooks in 2019, and O’Rourke seeks the second seat this year.

Philadelphia Common Pleas Court Judge Joshua Roberts on Friday rejected a Republican request to remove Brooks and O’Rourke from the ballot because they filed their statements of financial interests electronically rather than submitting hard copies with signatures in ink or pencil.

Charles M. Gibbs, a lawyer for Brooks and O’Rourke, said they used the electronic records portal that the city’s Department of Records set up. Gibbs noted that other elected officials — including the judge — have filed their own statements of financial interests that way this year.

Eric Rosso, a spokesperson for the Working Families Party, called the appeals “just another desperate attempt to take away voter choice” while predicting the effort will fail in the state’s Commonwealth Court.

Vince Fenerty, chair of the Republican City Committee, said his party respected Roberts’ ruling but considered it flawed.

“There are contradictory precedent cases,” Fenerty said. “I think it needs to be straightened out by the Commonwealth Court.”

The ballot challenges, filed last week in the names of Republican ward leaders Chris Vogler and Joseph Giedemann, cited a 2020 case in which Pennsylvania’s Democratic Party successfully petitioned to have the Green Party’s candidate for president removed from the ballot because a candidate’s affidavit had been faxed to the Department of State in Harrisburg instead of submitted on paper in that office.

But Roberts agreed with Gibbs that previous rulings allowed candidates to amend their statements of financial interests when they faced challenges in court.

Philadelphia’s Home Rule Charter requires that two of the seven at-large City Council seats go to candidates who are not members of the city’s majority party. For seven decades, that meant Democrats held five at-large seats while Republicans held two.

That changed in 2019 when Brooks won an at-large seat for the Working Families Party. She is trying to win a second term in November while O’Rourke is seeking the second seat, which is vacant because Republican David Oh resigned from Council to run for mayor.