{"id":146231,"date":"2026-03-23T19:43:07","date_gmt":"2026-03-23T19:43:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/146231\/"},"modified":"2026-03-23T19:43:07","modified_gmt":"2026-03-23T19:43:07","slug":"flynn-lake-remain-on-primary-ballot-after-challenges-dismissed-withdrawn","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/146231\/","title":{"rendered":"Flynn, Lake remain on primary ballot after challenges dismissed, withdrawn"},"content":{"rendered":"

Incumbent state Sen. Marty Flynn and Clarks Summit resident Jeffrey Lake, the newcomer challenging Flynn in the Democratic primary for his 22nd state Senate District seat, will both remain on the primary ballot after challenges seeking to remove them were dismissed or withdrawn.<\/p>\n

Commonwealth Court Judge Matthew Wolf dismissed Friday a pair of challenges to nomination petitions filed by Flynn because the challengers, Lake and Lawrence \u2018Larry\u2019 Sparano of La Plume Twp., failed to timely serve the secretary of the commonwealth with copies of their challenges as the state Election Code requires. Sparano\u2019s wife, retired pharmacist Sharon Soltis Sparano, is the presumptive Republican nominee for the state Senate seat.<\/p>\n

\u201cA petition to set aside a nomination petition must be timely filed with the court, and it must also be timely served on the Secretary,\u201d Wolf wrote in separate opinions accompanying court orders dismissing Lake\u2019s<\/a> and Sparano\u2019s<\/a> challenges. \u201cEven if the petition is timely filed, failure to serve the Secretary with the petition within the statutory period requires that the petition be dismissed.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"DemocratDemocrat Jeffrey Lake of Clarks Summit, a candidate for state senate in the 22nd District. He\u2019s challenging incumbent state Sen. Marty Flynn of Dunmore in the Democratic primary. (Photo Courtesy of Jeffry Lake)<\/p>\n

Court hearings on the dismissed challenges originally scheduled for Thursday morning were canceled.<\/p>\n

Flynn ally Lawrence \u2018Larry\u2019 Wynne also challenged Lake\u2019s petitions<\/a>, alleging he lacked the 500 valid signatures needed to secure a spot on the primary ballot, but Wynne withdrew that challenge over the weekend. A canceled hearing<\/a> had been scheduled for Monday morning.<\/p>\n

While Wynne initially argued that 318 of the 758 signatures Lake submitted were invalid for various reasons, attorney Kevin Greenberg, the lawyer representing Wynne in the matter, said Monday they ultimately determined Lake submitted between 502 and 510 valid signatures. That\u2019s enough to qualify for the ballot.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt doesn\u2019t matter if you make it by one line or 1,000, it\u2019s enough and he had enough, and so we were not going to waste the court\u2019s time or Mr. Lake\u2019s time continuing to fight beyond the point where we came to the conclusion that he was going to prevail,\u201d Greenberg said.<\/p>\n

Lake announced Monday in a press release that he\u2019d secured a place on the ballot despite the \u201cbullying, Trump-style machine tactics\u201d aimed at knocking him off.<\/p>\n

\u201cMarty Flynn and the insiders think they can play by a different set of rules,\u201d Lake said in the release. \u201cThat\u2019s exactly why people feel like their voices don\u2019t matter. But we proved that this campaign can\u2019t be pushed aside.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dismissed challenges<\/p>\n

In their separate and ultimately dismissed challenges, Lake argued<\/a> Flynn\u2019s submitted candidate affidavit was \u201cincomplete and facially defective\u201d because the line where candidates list their voting precinct was left blank.<\/p>\n

Larry Sparano argued<\/a> Flynn\u2019s petitions failed to contain the \u201crequired number of properly ascribed signatures,\u201d challenging 1,075 of Flynn\u2019s 1,384 signature lines for being out of compliance with requirements of the Election Code.<\/p>\n

Among other examples, Sparano raised numerous issues with petitions circulated for Flynn by Alpesh \u201cAl\u201d Patel.<\/p>\n

Many of the signatures on those petitions, the signers\u2019 addresses and their listed dates of signing appear to be written in the same or very similar handwriting styles. In some cases the \u201cprinted name of elector\u201d section of the signature line only includes the purported signer\u2019s initials.<\/p>\n

Greenberg, who also represented Flynn in the Lake and Sparano challenges, said Flynn would have prevailed in court had Judge Wolf not dismissed them.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe reality is they would have been tossed because they were meritless, but we didn\u2019t have to get to that point because both objectors couldn\u2019t follow very basic legal standards,\u201d Greenberg said. \u201cDon\u2019t get me wrong, Mr. Lake\u2019s allegation was technically true, but it\u2019s something the court regularly allows people to amend.\u201d<\/p>\n

Regarding the Sparano challenge, Greenberg said Flynn had more than enough valid signatures to secure a spot on the ballot.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut this was just an excuse for somebody to go online and talk about a few pages that are clearly unfortunate and that Mr. Flynn was not involved with in any way, except some volunteer did it for him and they are what they are,\u201d Greenberg said. \u201cBut he had plenty of signatures, valid signatures, and turns out Mr. Lake did too, although it took us time to confirm that.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sharon Soltis Sparano, who is unopposed for the Republican nomination for the state Senate seat in the GOP primary, said Monday she and her husband still believe Flynn lacked 500 valid signatures.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s unfortunate that we weren\u2019t able to produce that evidence in court,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

With the challenges either dismissed or withdrawn, Democratic primary election ballots will list both Flynn and Lake as candidates for state Senate in the 22nd District, which includes parts of Lackawanna and Luzerne counties. The winner will likely face Sparano in November.<\/p>\n

The primary election is May 19.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Incumbent state Sen. Marty Flynn and Clarks Summit resident Jeffrey Lake, the newcomer challenging Flynn in the Democratic…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":52306,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[836,201,182,803,139,28,50,178,180,179],"class_list":["post-146231","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-scranton","tag-election","tag-lackawanna-county","tag-local-news","tag-luzerne-county","tag-news","tag-pennsylvania","tag-politics","tag-scranton","tag-scranton-headlines","tag-scranton-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/146231","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=146231"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/146231\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/52306"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=146231"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=146231"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=146231"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}