Dean

Petitioner, a candidate for local office, seeks extraordinary writ relief mandating the registrar of voters delete part of an opponent’s candidate statement as an impermissible personal attack on petitioner. We issue relief and conclude the superior court erred in not ordering the deletion.

Darrell Opp seeks to unseat the incumbent petitioner, John F. Dean, as county superintendent of schools in the upcoming June 1998 election. Opp submitted a candidate statement to the registrar of voters which began with the following three paragraphs commenting on petitioner: “[ft] The incumbent, John Dean, is failing our schools, our children and the taxpayers, [ft] Under Dean’s tenure $250,000,000 (Two Hundred and Fifty Million!) was borrowed to gamble in the bankrupt Citron investment pool. Dean personally authorized this borrowing. He is one of the few remaining county officials who has not resigned or been removed from office for his role in this fiasco, [ft] Dean’s ‘leadership’ over the last eight years resulted in massive increases in the size of the County bureaucracy. Elected on a platform to cut the county budget, instead his budget has increased from $64 Million to over…