Ellis Ivory is getting the chance to be his party's official standard-bearer sooner than he and just about everyone else thought.

In a surprise move Wednesday, Salt Lake County Republican Party chairwoman Tiani Coleman certified Ellis — a write-in county mayoral candidate — as the party's official candidate, two weeks before a scheduled GOP central committee meeting in which members were to vote on whether to do just that.

"Time is of the essence," state GOP chairman Joe Cannon said. "Normally in political situations, it's form over substance. This is substance over form."

The central committee voted last week to throw its support behind Ivory, but GOP incumbent Nancy Workman was still in the race at that time, so it couldn't vote to make Ivory its official candidate.

Now that Workman has withdrawn, that vote is close enough, Coleman said.

"The vote on Oct. 5 clearly reflected the central committee's view," she said.

County Clerk Sherrie Swensen has said several times throughout the long Workman legal and political saga — which has continually threatened to impact the form of the ballot books that people will be using to vote — that she is worried about how to handle changes as the Nov. 2 general election looms.

While she didn't advocate anything specific, Swensen told Coleman Wednesday morning to do everything she could to expedite the party's process of choosing a candidate. The central committee meeting scheduled for Oct. 26 would give her only a few days to change more than 4,000 ballot books.

Regarding the propriety of Coleman's solution to the problem, Swensen said she only looks to see who the party certifies, not how it went about doing it.

"That's not up for me to say," she said.

Even Democratic Councilman Joe Hatch, who joined other Democrats Tuesday in saying they may legally challenge any attempt by the Republicans to replace Workman on the ballot, grudgingly said Wednesday that it's a party matter.

"That is not how the Democratic Party would have done it . . . (but) the state cannot control how they do it," he said.

Coleman submitted Ivory's name to county elections chief Julio Garcia Wednesday.

There is still some process to go through before Ivory's name appears on the ballot. Swensen said she will put the matter before the county district attorney's office and the state lieutenant governor's office to see if it passes legal muster before printing stickers with Ivory's name on them and pasting them over Workman's name on the ballot books.

The ballots themselves have no names on them — they are inserted in the voting machines next to the ballot books, which contain the explanations and candidate names.