A woman running for the School Committee is the second Westbrook candidate to be disqualified from this year’s election.

A voter appeals board Monday determined the Democratic nominee for the Ward 3 school board seat is actually a registered Republican.

The three-person board voted unanimously to deny the appeal from Martha Henderson, who wanted to run for the School Committee seat, despite the fact that city records showed she was registered in the wrong party. Incumbent Ed Symbol, a Republican, will now run unopposed.

The ruling brought a resolution to the latest in a string of issues that have arisen in the weeks before the Nov. 3 election. The complications have called into question two Westbrook traditions – the caucus system used to nominate candidates and the election of the city clerk. The legitimacy of the campaigns of two City Council candidates came up last month.

Councilor Lyle Cramer was disqualified from running for re-election to his Ward 3 seat, when the city discovered he actually lived in Ward 4.

And in Ward 5, Republican candidate Al Juniewicz, who was not nominated at his party’s caucus, failed to collect the 25 signatures required by the Sept. 18 deadline.

In Westbrook, candidates are typically nominated to run at caucuses held by their political parties. However, candidates can also get on the ballot by collecting 25 signatures and filing nomination papers with the city by a certain deadline.

However, a vote was taken at the caucus to allow Republican City Committee Chairwoman Martha Day to fill any vacancies on the ballot, which saved Juniewicz from being disqualified. The city’s attorney determined that all he needed in order to run was Day’s approval, which he received. Juniewicz’s opponent, Democrat Suzanne Joyce, could have appealed that decision to the City Council, but she decided not to.

At Henderson’s hearing, Bill Dale, the city’s attorney, said there’s almost nothing written in the local law regarding the caucus system of nominating candidates. He said the charter defers to state law, which, in turn, says local caucuses can come up with their own rules.

“You dig out the Westbrook stuff and expect to find pages and pages, and it’s just not there,” Dale said. Both Joyce and Symbol said the problems this year are an indication that either the rules of caucus system need to be nailed down or the tradition needs to be eliminated altogether.

“I think everyone should have to go out and get a certain number of signatures – something where you show you’re dedicated to running,” said Symbol.

City Clerk Lynda Adams said she confirmed candidates’ party affiliations in the city’s registry at the two parties’ caucuses. Not only was Henderson absent from the caucus, she didn’t even know she was being nominated. Henderson’s neighbor, Paul Emery, who is running for the Ward 3 City Council seat unopposed, threw her hat in the ring for her. Emery said he had a conversation with Henderson before the caucus, in which “she indicated a desire to serve on the board.”

A few weeks later, Henderson tried to withdraw her name from the ballot, but had missed the state’s Sept. 18 deadline to do so by one business day.

Henderson said she tried to withdraw because she hadn’t realized how much it cost to run a campaign, and with her husband having recently undergone hip surgery, she didn’t think she could afford it.

“It had nothing to do with not wanting to run,” she said. In both Henderson’s and Juniewicz’s case, the issues would have been resolved, or at least discovered earlier, had the candidates been present at their respective caucuses for their nominations. Henderson was nominated at the caucus, but not present, while Juniewicz was present but had not yet decided to run.

But Cramer’s situation had nothing to do with the caucus system. It did, however, point to the inconsistencies in the records in the clerk’s office – more of which have since surfaced. Henderson’s argument for being able to stay on the ballot was that her 1984 registration card, which indicates she’s a Republican, must have been filled out by someone else, because she knows she’s always been a Democrat.

“Republicans are very nice, too,” she said. “I’m just not one of them.”

Her case was supported by the fact that her husband, Bruce, was also incorrectly registered in the city’s database. There are two voter registration cards for Bruce Henderson. One shows he registered as a Republican in 1984, and another shows that, in 2007, he removed his party affiliation. But in the computer system, he’s still registered as a Republican, not an independent.

In addition, Adams said, there are about 300 voter registration cards missing for people who are registered voters in the computer system. In last year’s presidential election, she said, people discovered they were registered in the wrong party when they came out to vote.

The issues have come up as the clerk’s office has been attempting to clean up its system and check to see whether some of the city’s inactive voters still want to be registered in Westbrook.

This is the first time Adams, who was elected as clerk in 2007, has run a municipal election. She replaced Barbara Hawkes, who had been in the position for 14 years.

At least some of the problems that have come up predate Hawkes, but the confusion about Cramer’s ward happened sometime when she was in office. Hawkes said earlier this month that she doesn’t remember why Cramer and about 75 of his neighbors were registered in Ward 3 when they actually lived in Ward 4. Adams can’t figure it out either.

According to Cramer, he lived in Ward 3 until the city was redistricted in 1994 in order to balance the number of people who lived in each of the city’s five wards. He and his neighbors then began voting in Ward 4.

Several years later, Cramer said, they were told they were part of Ward 3 again, and Cramer was appointed as the Ward 3 warden, overseeing the ward’s polls at election time.

However, when Cramer pointed out to Adams last month that his home appeared to fall in Ward 4, according to a map in the clerk’s office, she discovered that, in the city’s code, Conant Street is, in fact, in Ward 4.

According to Adams, in order for the boundaries of a ward to be changed, the City Council would have to vote on the matter. That never happened, even though some residents were apparently re-designated to Ward 3 in the city’s voter database around 2002.

Though Joyce said Adams has done a great job as city clerk, the longstanding issues in the clerk’s records indicate that it shouldn’t be an elected office.

“I definitely think it should be a hired position,” she said. In 2007, voters rejected a measure that would have changed the city clerk’s position from an elected one to an appointed one. The ballot question to change the city charter failed, 1,115-854.

According to City Administrator Jerre Bryant, because it is an elected position, the city clerk has no boss at City Hall and answers only to the voters.

The complications that have come up throughout the past couple of months, Joyce said, show the city’s charter needs to be reviewed. The question of whether to form a commission to review the charter will be posed to Westbrook voters at a referendum in June. “It’s been one thing after another,” said Joyce. “We need to correct these things.”

For now, Adams and her co-workers in the clerk’s office are doing their best to get ready for the election that’s less than two weeks away.

“It’s unfortunate that things like this come up during election time,” when the clerk’s office is already very busy, Adams said Friday. “I think the most important thing is that things are straightened out so they don’t happen again,” she said.