A few days ago I wrote some comments previewing the hearing on petitions at the New York City Board of Elections.
I attended the hearing for a few hours and here’s some of what I observed.
A few candidates for Delegates to the Republican Judicial Convention were disqualified because they were, in fact, registered Democrats.
A candidate who wanted to run for the Assembly from the 55th Assembly District was removed because the address he is registered to vote from and which he put on the petition was in the 40th A.D.
A Democratic candidate for Assembly in the Bronx was knocked off the ballot because the signature requirement is 500 and he submitted at total of less than 150.
I don’t think many will consider these to be unfair technicalities.
On the other hand –
A bunch of Democratic incumbent legislators were deprived of the Working Families Party line because the required certificate of acceptance filed by the candidates did not list the district number. This, despite the fact that the WFP petitions and the authorizations submitted by the WFP did include the district. This is the type of technicality that might have had a rationale in the era when all records were kept on paper but no longer makes sense.
And a Democratic candidate for Assembly in Manhattan was removed because the name of the county was changed on some of his petitions and the changes were not initialed, while a Queens State Senate candidate, who apparently had enough good signatures, got knocked out because most of the witness statements did not include some required information.
But technicalities also work to help candidates stay on the ballot too!
A number of candidates running in Independence Party primaries had the objections to their petition dismissed because the objections to the petitions were filed on July 14th rather than July 13th.
Speaking of the Independence Party, I regret to inform the readers of this blog that a race we were looking forward to seems to have vanished. Bernie Goetz’ petitions for Independence Party State Committee were invalidated.