West Philadelphia resident Solange Chadda took her crusade to get on the Senate ballot to court yesterday morning - only to be shot down by the judge after her lawyer failed to show up.
But Chadda said she's not willing to give up the fight, even if that means taking her case to the U.S. Supreme Court.
The native of France, now a U.S. citizen, alleges that the campaign of Democratic Senate candidate Bob Casey stole the petitions she needed to get on the ballot.
But presiding Judge Michael Baylson said that as far as Philadelphia's U.S. District Court is concerned, she's out of luck.
"I don't have any power to put you on the ballot," Baylson said, adding that "it's too late to get you on the ballot."
"If the Casey people didn't steal my petitions, I would have been on the ballot," Chadda insisted in a thick French accent.
Representatives from the Casey campaign weren't in court, and Baylson told Chadda that she had not properly informed the campaign of the case.
Casey campaign officials have not returned calls for comment.
The credibility of Chadda's evidence was also called into question yesterday. Baylson said that important pieces of Chadda's evidence - including alleged handwriting samples of a Casey campaign worker and a recorded telephone message - were inadmissible because they could not be confirmed or denied by witnesses.
Chadda said she was unable to get two witnesses - both of whom live in California - to come to Philadelphia in time for the hearing.
Local politicians, election experts and even her neighbors agree that Chadda did not seem to have a case.
Jan Witold Baran, a campaign and elections lawyer at the Washington law firm Wiley, Rein and Fielding, said that there is no precedent for Chadda's claim.
"I have never heard of anyone succeeding in asking a court to postpone an election so that they could have more time to qualify to be on the ballot," Baran said.
Al Filreis, faculty director of the Kelly Writers House and Chadda's neighbor, tried to put the incident into perspective.
"This neighborhood has a lot of character and a lot of characters," Filreis said. "If [Chadda] pays her taxes, then I'm OK."
When Baylson asked Chadda why she and her attorneys waited until the week before the midterm elections to file the complaint when they had been building the case since July, she said that the firm her lawyer Joshua Beisker works for - Erik Jensen and Associates of Philadelphia -was small and "very busy" with other cases.
But Beisker was not available for comment, and others in the political scene are not so sure.
Philadelphia Green Party politician Carl Romanelli, who also alleges that he was wrongfully denied a place on the U.S. Senate ballot, said that he has never even heard of Chadda.
"Just because of the volume of signatures required this year - 67,070 minimum - I think that if there was another candidate circulating, we would have known," Romanelli said.
This is not Chadda's first time in the courtroom. In the 1990s, she filed a trademark infringement lawsuit against Lane Bryant Inc., alleging that the women's plus-size retailer stole her name from her own product line, Solange Inc., and used it for its own line of women's intimate apparel. Chadda claimed millions of dollars in damages, but said she didn't see a cent.
"My ex-husband got the money," she said.
