HD-78 Candidate Removed from Ballot After Court Challenge Reveals Residency Problem
Sawyer Dennison spent months knocking doors in a Morgantown legislative district he may never have legally lived in. On Thursday, a judge made it official and sent him home.
A Kanawha County circuit judge ordered a House of Delegates candidate removed from the May primary ballot Thursday after the candidate’s own attorneys conceded the case against him, capping a fast-moving legal fight that exposed a residency problem at the heart of a competitive Morgantown-area legislative race.
Judge Carrie Webster signed the order on Thursday afternoon, March 26, directing Secretary of State Kris Warner to withdraw his certification of Sawyer Dennison as a candidate for House District 78. Election officials across the state were ordered to disregard any votes cast for Dennison, whether on Election Day or by absentee ballot.
The case, filed March 16 by petitioner John Sedoski, a Monongalia County Republican Executive Committee member and District 78 voter, turned not on complicated legal arguments but on a lease. Dennison’s own attorneys submitted an apartment lease agreement showing their client has lived at 2001 Brunswick Court in Morgantown since November 3, 2025, an address squarely within House District 78. That much, at least, was not in dispute.
What made Thursday’s filing unusual was what came next. Rather than fight the petition, Dennison’s counsel at Porter Wright Morris & Arthur LLP filed a response asking the court to rule against their own client. Attorney Joshua Stephan wrote that Dennison had “elected not to challenge or otherwise contest the Petition” and requested the writ be granted, while carefully preserving a hedge that Dennison was “not conceding any of the factual allegations” in the original petition.
That lawyerly caveat matters little now. The order is signed, the certification is pulled, and the Monongalia County Clerk has been notified.
The Secretary of State’s office took no position on the underlying facts, a posture the court noted in its order.
A Candidate in Transit
The district switch itself had drawn quiet scrutiny even before the lawsuit landed. Court records show Dennison originally filed pre-candidacy paperwork for District 80 in September, listing a different residential address at 416 Harding Avenue. By December, he had reoriented entirely to District 78, appearing on WAJR’s “Talk of the Town” to announce his candidacy there.
The petition painted a complicated picture of Dennison’s residency timeline. It noted that until at least November 12, 2025, Dennison remained registered to vote in Raleigh County and cast his ballot there in the 2024 general election. He filed his pre-candidacy forms for District 80 while not even registered to vote in that district.
The WAJR interview also surfaced a biographical detail worth noting: Dennison interned on Capitol Hill with Patrick Morrisey while the governor was serving as Attorney General, and later worked full-time for U.S. Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa. The résumé places him squarely inside the orbit of national conservative infrastructure, a background that shaped his campaign platform around income tax elimination and federal spending restraint.
Whether those connections played any role in the late district switch is unknown. No one from Dennison’s campaign responded to a request for comment Thursday.
Two Men Left Standing
Dennison’s exit reshapes what had been a three-way Republican primary. He had been running against incumbent Del. “Geno” Chiarelli and challenger Cohen Terneus, with the May 12 primary now reduced to a head-to-head matchup between the two.
For Chiarelli, a Morgantown-area substance abuse counselor who has also worked in child protective services first elected in 2022, the development removes one variable from what had been shaping up as a contested primary fight. Whether Dennison’s supporters, if he had built any meaningful base after months of campaigning, break toward Chiarelli or Terneus in the compressed time remaining before Election Day is an open question. What is clear is that a three-way race, which can produce volatile results by splitting votes unpredictably, is now a straightforward two-man contest.
Terneus, a self-described lifelong West Virginian and small business owner making his first run for office, has built his campaign around cutting red tape, lowering taxes, fixing crumbling roads, and keeping political agendas out of schools. For him, the math changes too. Any vote share Dennison might have drawn now has nowhere to go but between the two remaining candidates.
Del. Chiarelli did not provide an official comment for this story.
A Quiet Concession with Open Questions
What remains unanswered publicly is the question at the core of the petition: where, exactly, Dennison was legally domiciled for purposes of running in the district. The West Virginia Constitution requires candidates to have resided in their district for one full year preceding the election. The lease places Dennison in Morgantown no earlier than November 3, 2025, well short of that threshold relative to the May 12 primary.
The court did not need to resolve the factual dispute because Dennison’s own legal team handed the petitioner a win before the fight began.
The episode lands with particular force heading into primary season. A candidate who filed, qualified, and made it onto a ballot was removed less than seven weeks before Election Day, not by a bare-knuckle legal brawl but by a concession from his own attorneys. He arrived in District 78 late, announced loudly, knocked hundreds of doors by his own account, and exits without a single vote counted.
The WASP will continue reporting on the HD-78 race as the Chiarelli-Terneus primary develops.
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