TAHLEQUAH, Okla. – Two lawsuits challenging the outcome of the 2013 Cherokee Nation Tribal Council election were filed Monday afternoon with the tribe’s Supreme Court.

Citing voting irregularities, current council member Meredith Frailey of Locust Grove, Okla., is one of the two candidates appealing the results of the June 22 midterm election. According to unofficial results, Frailey finished second to Janees Taylor by 27 votes in a three-woman race.

Last year, the Cherokee Tribal Council approved a new map with 15 single representative districts. The council had previously used a five-district map with three representatives per district. The district in question, No. 15, includes portions of southern Rogers and Mayes counties. In her filing, Frailey alleges that at least two voters who live outside the district were allowed to vote in the District 15 race and another 20 Cherokee citizens whose addresses were within the district’s boundaries were turned away.

“By adjusting the number of votes that should have been cast in District 15 to account for those irregularities, the total votes cast by District 15 candidates is 588 votes,” wrote Frailey’s attorney, former Principal Chief Chad Smith. “For a candidate to be elected by a majority, she must have received 295 votes, which no candidate in District 15 did in the primary election.”

Under the tribe’s election code, if no one candidate in a race receives more than 50 percent of the votes cast, the top two finishers advance to a run-off election. Frailey is requesting the June election results be invalidated due to the lack of mathematical certainty and that she be allowed to participate in a run-off election with Taylor.

Robin Mayes, who finished fourth among six candidates for an-large council seat, also filed a lawsuit Monday.

Earlier this year, Mayes filed petitions with the Northern District of Oklahoma’s federal court in Tulsa, Okla., and the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals to try to block the election from happening or allow him to intervene in the Cherokee Nation’s long-pending lawsuit over the citizenship eligibility of Freedmen descendants.

Monday’s appeal from the Denton, Texas, resident seeks to have the entire election invalidated because of the roughly 4,000 pending citizenship applications from Freedmen descendants. While federal litigation continues, the Cherokee Nation has not processed citizenship applications from Freedmen descendants who do not have at least one ancestor listed as Cherokee, Cherokee-Delaware or Cherokee-Shawnee on the Dawes Rolls.

His suit also names the tribe’s registration department and attorney general, Todd Hembree, as defendants on the grounds that they are “restricting a certain class…from registering for CNO (Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma) membership and voting in said election while allowing just a few hundred of the same class of Cherokee citizen to vote and participate in full citizenship benefits.”

Oral arguments for Mayes’ challenge are set for 9 a.m. Friday.