In a surprise, GOP-endorsed candidate for lieutenant governor says she didn’t collect enough signatures to make ballot

Politics admin May 13, 2026 0 Comments

In a surprise, GOP-endorsed candidate for lieutenant governor says she didn’t collect enough signatures to make ballot

Anne Brensley, the state Republican Party’s endorsed candidate for lieutenant governor, did not collect enough signatures to qualify for the Septemberballot, she said Wednesday — a failure that would significantly derail her campaign to help lead the GOP ticket this fall.

Brensley blamed the shortfall on a consultant she hired to help gather the 10,000 signatures she needed to qualify. The Wayland Republican is accusing Joe Bronske, who also serves as chair of the Weymouth Republican Town Committee, of failing to get thesignatures she paid him to collect.

Brensley said Secretary of State William F. Galvin’s office also informed her that local clerks from Scituate, Hanover, and Rockland flagged some of the signatures her campaign submitted, citing forgery concerns. Brensley needed to submit enough signatures to local clerks by May 5 in order to get her name on the ballot.

Bronske didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment Wednesday.

Brensley’s failure to make the ballot wouldmark a stunning turn for a candidate who won 56 percent of the vote from delegates at the Massachusetts Republican Party’s nominating convention in Worcester last month.

Brensley, an attorney and a former Wayland select board member, said she intends to petition Galvin’s office for additional time to collect the needed signatures.

“This has nothing to do with whether people would really want [me] as a candidate,” she said Wednesday. “I got over 1,000 people at the convention to vote, and [I’m] the endorsed candidate, right?”

Deb O’Malley, a Galvin spokesperson, confirmed that clerks from three cities and towns had reached out with concerns about potential fraudulent signatures submitted on behalf of some candidates. Galvin cannot extend or alter the deadline for signature gathering, O’Malley said, because it is set in law.

Brensley said she loaned her campaign $17,500 to pay Bronske for his services, though campaign finance covering through April do not show her campaign making any payments to him.Brensley had a little more than $4,000 in her campaign coffers at the end of April, and that she had given her campaign $29,000 of her own money,records show.

Two other candidates — Michael Walsh, a Lynnfield attorney running for attorney general, and Anne Manning Martin, another candidate for lieutenant governor — had also hired Bronske to collect signatures, campaign finance records show.

Walsh — who paid Bronske’s company, Ancestors’ Trail Genealogy, $20,000 — did not immediately respond to a request for comment Wednesday.

Jaclyn Corriveau, a spokesperson for Manning Martin, did not address that she had tapped Bronske to help with signature collection, but said she was confident in Manning Martin’s ability to make the ballot. Her campaign paid Bronske’s company at least $5,650 for signature gathering, records show.

“We’re sorry to hear that any fraudulent activity may have impacted other campaigns,” Corriveau said.

Wendy Wakeman, a Republican strategist not involved with any of the campaigns, said candidates effectively have three resources in every campaign: time, money, and volunteers.

“You can make up for money with volunteers; you can make up for volunteers with money. But you can never make up for time,” she said. “And Anne Brensley found herself the anointed candidate of the GOP with less than a week to finish obtaining all the signatures. That’s a tough spot.”

Unlike Martin Manning and the third Republican lieutenant governor candidate, Shawn Oliver, Brensley was not running as a ticket with one of the three GOP gubernatorial candidates.

However, Mike Minogue, a GOP megadonor and medical device businessman who overwhelmingly nabbed the party’s endorsement for governor, threw his support behind her ahead of the convention.

A spokesperson for Minogue didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

If she indeed is barred from the ballot,Brensley said she intends to continue her campaign, running as a write-in candidate.

“I said that I was on a mission to change a state, and I mean it,” Brensley said. “And if I have to run a full blown campaign as a sticker candidate, knowing that I’m at a huge disadvantage for doing that, that’s what I’m going to do.”