In a race between Russ Gallo and Ben Akselrod, I am agnostic.
I do not care which of them can deny more minority religions a place to worship, or deny LGTB persons more rights.
When it comes to unconscionable, unspeakable demagoguery and bigotry, I think we can call it a draw.If someone held a gun to my testes and asked me to make a choice between them, I’d say “shoot me now.”
But that doesn’t mean I can’t have a viewpoint on which one of them was more full of shit in their recently concluded battle for the Independence Party line in the November election.
To review, Gallo, one of the slugs behind the egregious and repugnant Brooklyn GOP Radio and a member in good standing of the Brooklyn GOP’s pro-Craig Eaton/Marty Golden “Jig Is Up” wing is already the Republican/Conservative candidate for Assembly in Brooklyn’s 45th AD.
Akselrod, who recently lost a closely contested primary to the moderately conservative incumbent Steve Cymbrowitz, started out his campaign by attacking gays and Muslims and went downhill from there; by the end of the campaign, he was sending out mail with racially suggestive typos and attacking the incumbent’s wife for being a Latina.
Both wanted the Independence line. Akselrod even had a theory that if he lost the Democratic primary, he could still win on the IP line with his opponents splitting the non-Russian vote.
He may even be right.
Anyway, all three candidates put in at least some effort.
Cymbrowitz restricted his campaign to mailing, figuring the Dem primary was probably all or nothing for him, but the other two ran full-scale IP operations.
The primary’s existence came courtesy of an Opportunity To Ballot Petition. Since no candidate qualified an actual candidate’s designating petition, all three candidates were seeking write in votes.
The vote certified by the board of elections was 16 Akselrod, 13 Gallo, 5 Cymbrowitz, one for James Grande, one unattributable and three blank.
I attribute the last number to the fact that IP voters are the lowest of the low information electorate. Like Rupert Murdoch, they checked the “Independence” box thinking they weren’t joining any party at all. Those three voters probably thought they were going to be allowed to vote in the Democratic Primary and then saw a blank ballot and gave up,
Which, given what actually happened on Election Day, is painfully ironic, but we’ll get to that soon.
Anyway, Gallo went loco, telling the Daily News he had spoken to five registered members of the third party who showed up at the polls, but were given the wrong ballots.
The five filed affidavits saying they intended to vote for Gallo on the Independence line. In the affidavits, the voters said they showed up, signed in, and wrote in Gallo’s name on the Democratic ballots they were given.
Gallo went to court seeking to have the nomination given to him instead of Akselrod, or, in the alternative, for the Independence line to be left blank.
“It’s unbelievable to me, not that the Board of Elections screwed up, but that I could have an election stolen from me in this country,” said Gallo, subtly dog-whistling that he was the candidate who was born in this country.
He also started repeating every minute or so that he’d served in Iraq.
I honor his service, which stands in contrast with the record of his Party’s Presidential nominee, but it is hardly relevant to the legal question at hand.
At any rate, Gallo told only part of the story, which is both far worse than he originally let on, but in the end disproves pretty conclusively that the election was stolen from him.
In actuality, though five voters said they cast write in votes for Gallo for some office in the Democratic primary, only four such votes were found in the relevant election districts.
But that is the least of it.
On primary day, it wasn’t four or five voters Independence Party voters who were disenfranchised by Board of Elections error in the 45th AD.
It was 21.
Sixty Independence Party voters in the 45th AD signed in at their polling places to vote in their Party’s primary.
Twenty- one were given Democratic ballots they didn’t want.
This easily trumps the three who might actually have wanted to vote in the Democratic primary but couldn’t.
Over 1/3 of the voters in the 45th AD Independence Party Primary were disenfranchised by the inspectors at their polling places.
Subtracting the four Gallo votes, that makes 17 other voters.
Four of the other voters signed affidavits saying they went to the polls to write-in Akselrod, but were happy to see that his was name printed on ballot and voted for him that way.
It seems quite obvious the remaining 13 voters probably voted for either Akselrod or Cymbrowitz in Democratic primary, but they did not have to write them in because they were already on the ballot.
An observer told me that many of these voters, perhaps most, had Russian names, It made the observer wonder if the Republican inspectors, who accounted for 50% of those working at the polls, gave Russian voters the wrong ballots on purpose.
These stats make it highly unlikely that Russ Gallo had anything stolen from him.
If anyone had votes stolen from him, it was probably Ben Akselrod
Moreover, the conduct of Gallo’s lawyer’s proves they probably knew this.
Gallo's lawyers did not ask for a new primary, the only remedy available at law, because they knew they would lose it.
Instead, they asked for the judge to declare the loser the winner, or to leave the line blank.
Gallo wanted to cure massive disenfranchisement with even more massive disenfranchisement.
In the end, the Judge rightly found that the remedy Russ Gallo did not want was justified, but denied the relief, because the Board of Elections opposed it as it was impossible to accomplish logistically under the applicable law and rules in the allowable time.
Gallo is now screaming about this being unfair, and he’s right.
It is unfair to the disenfranchised voters.
Not that Gallo cared about them when he argued the case.
In fact, neither candidate made any factual or legal argument challenging the position of the Board of Elections opposing a new primary.
Akselrod knew he would have won a rerun, but clearly did not want the bother and expense.
And Gallo knew Akselrod would win a rerun and didn’t even ask for one, so why challenge the Board’s opposition to doing what he never asked for?
So, in the end, for reason having nothing to do with this court case, Russ Gallo and Ben Akselrod are both the moral equivalents of excrement wrapped in skin.
But, in this instance, only Russ Gallo is literally full of shit.