The guys WeAA ran with tried to keep others from running, to enhance their chances which failed miserably. As a Local, it has been a long practice, including with the Treasurer WeAA ran with, to not pursue the collection of dues from those Members that went off payroll due to a work-related injury. Therefore, no one, under those circumstances, walked their dues to the Local and it wasn't pursued as outlined in the Consitution.
OK. In a particular case, the Member did pay their dues on a monthly basis to take away a technicality from those in office since they had a history of trying to exclude others from running. Constitutionally, our dues are paid monthly so each month the dues were sent it.
In January of 2015, we had a three check month, so the Treasurer wanted to make the argument of the dues being late even though our dues are monthly, not per pay period. Aside from that, they had the check at the beginning of the month, but they waited until after the grace period passed to bring up the discrepancy. Once the member was notified, indirectly, there was another check delivered to the Local to comply with the pay period argument, but by that time they said it was too late.
The bigger argument is that there is a process, a Constitutional process, which gives the Member the ability to pay what he is in arrears over a 30-day period once they send a letter to the member to notify them of the discrepancy. Obviously, that process was never done, and it excluded four other potential candidates who were also reported as in bad standing even though they were never given a chance to make up the dues and those four didn't even make an attempt to pay their dues.
Given the facts, the Election Committee did the right thing and allowed everyone to run since the Treasurer didn't fulfill the requirement of the Constitution. WeAA wants to defend a Treasurer that didn't comply with the Constitution but wanted to exclude the competition from the local elections.