Betsy Vega has been certified by Marion County Elections as the winner of the May 19 election for the Ward 6 city council seat, as she got 44 more votes than Mai Vang, the incumbent.
But Paige Barton, Vang’s campaign manager, has filed a complaint with the City of Salem that asserts Vega may not be qualified to be a city councilor, according to the City Charter.
Section 25. Qualifications.
(1) An elective city officer shall be a qualified elector under the state constitution and shall have resided in the city during the 12 months immediately before being elected or appointed to the office. In this subsection “city” means area inside the city limits at the time of the election or appointment. In addition, a councilor shall have resided in the ward the councilor represents during the 12 months immediately before being elected or appointed to the office.
The City Attorney and City Recorder are conducting an investigation into whether Vega complied with the City Charter that’s expected to be completed by June 22. Barton is challenging both whether Vega was a qualified elector and whether she met the 12 month residency requirement in Ward 6.
While I’m not a lawyer, I worked closely with attorneys during our rural neighborhood’s successful fight against a subdivision that threatened our ground and surface water. The law fascinates me, as does this legal challenge.
Barton has provided evidence that Vega may not have been a continuous resident of Ward 6 during the year prior to her election, May 19, 2025 to May 19, 2026. While there is some room for debate about the definition of “resides” (for example, taking a two-week vacation in another state doesn’t mean residency changed), case law is fairly clear in this area.
It seems to me that Barton has an even stronger chance of prevailing in her challenge on the basis of whether Vega was a qualified elector under the Oregon constitution. At the end of her addendum to the complaint, Barton says:
I wish to contest the candidate eligibility of Betsy Vega due to failure to be a qualified elector while a candidate for Salem City Council between the dates of December 1, 2025, through March 18, 2026.
When Vega was certified as a candidate for Salem City Council on or about January 30, 2026, she had moved and did not appropriately update her voter registration or notify election officials of her move, as required by both statute and her attestation.
Because of this, her residence during this period is unknown. Even if she had resided at her most recent address during that time, I argue that her failure to update her voter registration for a period of approximately 108 days or longer and becoming certified as a candidate during that time is disqualifying.
This is deceptive and creates unfair conditions for every other candidate who did not conduct themselves this way. This is the cause for my challenge to Vega’s candidacy.
Now, I realize that probably lots of people fail to update their voter registration after they’ve moved. However, they’re not running to be a city councilor. Vega was. And it sure seems like Barton has provided persuasive evidence that Vega did not meet the criteria of a qualified elector in the state constitution. Which would disqualify Vega from becoming a city councilor under Salem’s City Charter.
This morning I finished reading the “Reasonableness in the Law” chapter of Krista Lawlor’s interesting book, Being Reasonable: The Case for a Misunderstood Virtue. This passage struck me as applying directly to the complaint about Vega’s qualification to be a city councilor.
Why doesn’t the law just come out and say what it means to be reasonable? The answer, in part, owes to the fact that reasonableness is used as a standard (of behavior, judgment, feeling), and not as a rule. Laws encode both standards and rules. For instance, the Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution sets some standards:
“Excessive force shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.”
People seeking to abide by this law must use their own judgment about what counts as excessive bail, or cruel and unusual punishment, or inhuman and degrading treatment. Article II of the U.S. Constitution, by contrast, lays down a rule: No person is eligible to be President who is less than thirty-five years old. A person seeking to abide by this law — say, a candidate deciding whether to run for president — does not need to exercise their judgment to do as this law says. Knowing how old they are is enough.
Jeremy Waldron, a professor of law and philosophy, puts the contrast between standards and rules this way: “A standard is a norm that requires some evaluative judgment of the person who applies it, whereas a rule is a norm presented as the end product of evaluative judgments already made by the lawmaker.”
So City of Salem officials investigating Vega’s qualifications to be a city councilor are applying rules in the City Charter. The lawmakers who created the City Charter applied evaluative judgments in coming up with those rules. A city councilor candidate must be a qualified elector under the state constitution and must have resided in the ward they hope to represent for twelve months prior to the election.
These rules obviously are intended to make sure that a city councilor has a solid connection with the people in their ward, rather than a flimsy connection — such as by moving into the ward just prior to the election. There is no leeway to a legal rule, while a legal standard contains some “fudge factors.”
I’m hoping that the City Attorney and City Recorder recognize this. They may be tempted to say, technically Vega didn’t meet the requirements to be a city councilor, but she was elected by the voters of her ward, so we will let her election stand. But in the case of a legal rule, “technically” is the whole ball game.
Whether the requirement to be a qualified elector is viewed as technical or non-technical doesn’t matter. It is a rule in the City Charter that a city council candidate has to meet.
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