One of these editorials is not like the others:
DAILY NEWS EDITORIAL (4/21/2000): EMBARRASSED AFTER GETTING caught trying to run a rigged presidential primary, New York's Republican leaders have suddenly become converts to the cause of ballot reform. Better late than never – but they still are falling short of a fully democratic process….While they're at it, they also should reform the ballot-access rules for all the other races in the state. Aside from the presidential primary, New York's ballot rules, designed to help those favored by party bosses, are among the most unfair in the nation.
Primary elections must be as open as possible – to all candidates.
DAILY NEWS EDITORIAL (7/2/03): Clearly, the one-party system is failing New York. Just getting on the ballot is an almost insurmountable task – tougher than anywhere else in the nation. Election lawyers stand at the ready, waiting to block insurgents. Half the ballot-access challenges in the U.S. take place in the Empire State. [GATE NOTE: this supposed fact is dead wrong] This is not something to be proud of.
DAILY NEWS EDITORIAL (10/20/12): State Board of Elections lets unqualified candidates run for President
Top of Socialism and Liberation ticket is too young and veep wasn’t born here
Party for Socialism and Liberation ticket of Peta Lindsay and Yari Osorio shouldn’t be on the ballot.
Voters who cast presidential election ballots will have a choice of candidates beyond Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. They include Peta Lindsay and Yari Osorio, ticket of the Marxist Party for Socialism and Liberation.
Lindsay is 28, seven years younger than the constitutional mandate of 35. Osorio was born in Colombia, disqualifying him. Yet the state Board of Elections, which nitpicks authentic candidates off the ballot, let them run. How dumb can you get?
The Daily News should make up its mind.
For years, it has been screaming against ballot access challenges and for easier ballot access.
Except when it finds a candidate it really dislikes.
When The News really dislikes a candidate, it not only supports challenging that candidate and taking away his ballot access, but also engaging in extraordinary and extra-legal efforts to do so.
How extraordinary and extra-legal?
Well normally, the City and State Boards of Elections, with rare and limited exceptions, presume all petitions and all candidacies to be valid.
While all nominating petitions and all candidacies are subject to being challenged, if those challenges don’t emerge within the legally specified time periods, then the candidates on those petitions get on the ballot, even, as is often the case with fringe candidates from non-ballot status parties, their petitions are great (or more likely tiny) steaming piles of fraud, or there are other legal problems involving the candidates.
As John Conklin the spokesman for the NYS Board of Elections noted, when contacted about Lindsay and Osorio, every candidate is assumed to be eligible until a formal challenge is made.
And none was made.
And that’s fair.
Those who favor greater ballot access certainly should not want the presumption of a petition’s validity and/or a candidate’s eligibility questioned by the government, when no other candidate is challenging that presumption. That would not expand the ballot access The News usually claims to advocate; it would contract it severely, mostly at the cost of candidates from minor parties making the ballot.
Is The News advocating that the Boards of Election abandon its live and let live position, and start examining the petitions and qualifications of each and every candidate to ensure they are valid?
Most petitions are not the subject of specific objections requiring a line by line review.
To expand the supervisory role of Boards of Elections to examine unchallenged petitions, or investigate unchallenged candidates would require massive increases of personnel to perform a non-essential function no one purports to desire.
This from a newspaper which has consistently opposed budget increases to allow the City’s Board of Elections to perform its necessary and essential functions.
The State Board of Elections was following its mandate.
Now, the News is asking the State Board, without, a legal complaint before it, to undertake actions entirely without a legal justification.
According to the State Board of Elections’ latest published statistics, there are 11,477,613 registered voters in the State of New York.
11,477,613.
Every single one of those voters was legally eligible to file a challenge to the right of Lindsay and Osorio to run in this year’s election.
Every single one of them.
Doubtless, this number included at least a few members of The Daily News Editorial Board.
But none of them filed a challenge, and now they have the nerve to complain.
Now, I yield to no one in my disdain for stupid leftists, and Lindsay, Osorio and the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) are pretty much as stupid as they come.
PSL is an ideologically indistinguishable split off from the Stalinist Workers World Party (WWP), a tiny political sect with a perverse attraction to the world’s worst people.
WWP formed in the 1950s, after splitting off from the Socialist Workers Party over a disagreement about the Soviet invasion of Hungary, which the Workers World supported. After that, the WWP threw itself behind Slobodan Milosevic, Saddam Hussein, and Kim Jong-il; it backed the Chinese crackdown on the “counter-revolutionary rebellion” in Tiananmen Square. WWP was not just pro-Palestinian; it was pro-Hamas and pro-Hezbollah, devoted to the destruction of Israel. WWP’s fringe views would hardly be worth noticing if not for its members’ organizing skills. For example, by securing protest permits on significant dates far in advance, it was able to take a leading role in the early marches against the Iraq war, even though many progressives were mortified by its involvement, and for a long time controlled International ANSWER and the International Action Center.
Since the split, control over ANSWER has largely reverted to PSL, which on its website labels the US’s laudable effort to stop genocide in the Balkans and our successfully effort to defeat the Nazis as “Imperialist Wars.”
By the way, PSL, WWP, International ANSWER and the International Action Center have a long history of cooperative work with our own Charles Barron.
But I still have to wonder why the News would abandon its every principle to see Lindsay and Osorio removed from the ballot.
What could it be that has raised all this ire?
What could have stirred them so?
The News’ coverage of the race had barely noticed McMillan’s vile anti-Semitism.
What McMillan (by the logical inference, if such a thing can be said to apply to McMillan, that if “The Rent Is Too Damn High,” the market needs to be restrained) and PSL (by rigid ideology) share is a presumption that the free market is not a very good thing.
This seems to drive the News bonkers, so much so that they regularly abandon their crusade for unfettered ballot access to advocate the use of extralegal tactics to deny such folks a place on the ballot, due process be damned.
The Daily News is almost willful in its inability to understand that we are a nation of laws.
The News would rather decide upon issues by dividing the world between good and evil people, and then ignoring all facts and subtle distinctions which might cast doubt on its pre-chewed worldview.
In this case, in the mind (perhaps not the best choice of words) of the Daily News Editorial Board, Reds are bad, and the Board of Elections is bad, and all the rest is commentary.
To the Daily News Editorial Board, there is only thing in the world which is worse than a Marxist group or an Election Board.
Intellectual rigor.