Author: Jerry Skurnik

Every year, we hear a lot of hyperbole about elections – “This is the most important election of our lifetime”, “X’s campaign is the worst I’ve ever seen”, “Y’s ads are the nastiest of all time”, etc.

But I think I can say without fear of contradiction that this year’s election for Civil Court Judge in 7th District in Manhattan is the strangest in memory.

The 7th District boundaries are basically 110th Street west of 8th Avenue to the upper tip of Manhattan.

This year, 2 Civil Court judges are to be elected. As is most judicial races, the winners here are inevitably chosen in the Democratic Primary. However, that’s not what’s happening here. For one of the two positions, there is a Democratic candidate – Rita Mella, who is presently the Law Clerk to Brooklyn Surrogate Margarita Lopez Torres. But for reasons that are both too complicated and murky, there is no Democratic candidate for the other slot. And for reasons that are simple (they assumed there would be a full slate of Democratic candidates, there are no Republican, Independence, Conservative or Working Families Party candidates either.

As a pre- Halloween gift to the gullible, Urban Elephants posted a third hand report claiming that dead people are voting for Democrats in New York.

Here’s the post.

Via Instapundit, just in time for Halloween, despite Republican John Ravitz serving as head of the Board of Elections, it seems that the dead still vote frequently here in NYC– generally for Democrats.

Check it out.

So what will it take to clean up the New York voter database once and for all?

Gatemouth did an excellent job analyzing and commenting on the Primary election results. However, he was limited by having only Assembly District returns. I have now obtained the results by E.D. so can try to look a little more deeply into some of the results.

10^th CD & 11^th CD

In the 10^th CD, Congressman Ed Towns won a narrower than expected victory. Towns received 19,469 votes (47%) to Councilman Charles Barron’s 15,345 (37%) and Assemblyman Roger Green’s 6,237 (16%).

The race to replace Congressman Major Owens in the 11^th was won by Councilwoman Yvette Clarke – 15,711 votes 31% to Councilman David Yassky’s 13,928 (27%) – State Senator Carl Andrews – 11,685 (23%) and Chris Owens – 9,971 (19%).

Joe Torre & Karl Rove

posted by Jerry Skurnik
Thu, 10/12/2006 – 10:08am

His campaign was run by Karl Rove who is so smart that one book about him is titled Bush’s Brain and another Boy Genius. Rove is so brilliant that political reporters are probably trying to find out if he is behind the North Korean nuclear tests.

In reading and hearing some New York City sportswriters call for the firing of Joe Torre, I’m reminded of how too many political writers write about the people who run political campaigns the same way.

Just as baseball writers and fans were quick to brand Torre a loser despite his overall record (one Daily News writer said if Torre was re-hired the Yankees were telling their fan to settle for mediocrity – after a 97 win season!), too many political reporters and folks who comment on blogs consider anyone involved with a winning campaign a genius and anyone in a losing one an idiot.

It now seems likely that that this year was the last where candidates for New York Sate Supreme Court Justices will be chosen by conventions. This is a result of 2 Federal Court decisions that ruled the present convention system illegal.

Despite talk of switching to an appointive system, the most likely change is that candidate for Supreme Court will, starting next year, be picked in Primary elections. That is because a change to an appointive system requires amending the State Constitution and that will take at least three years.

While many reformers and good government types who sincerely want to have a high quality court system have proposals to improve the way these judges will be elected (public financing, smaller districts, independent screening panels), these changes are so controversial that I doubt the State Legislature will agree to them.

While the newspapers and various websites have listed the Primary winners for public office, none that I’m aware of, has listed what happened in the contests for Party office. The fights in the Independence Party are too confusing for me to follow, so I will defer to Gatemouth who has previously commented on them and there were no contests in New York City in the Republican, Conservative & Working Families Parties for Party Office. So here are the winners and losers in Democratic Party races for State Committee and District Leader, with a little commentary in cases where I know something.

Since the New York Observer has anointed me as an expert on New York Times endorsements, I feel compelled to point out what’s wrong with these comments in Tuesday’s New York.

First, not even New York City Democrats listen to what New York Times editorials tell them to do. The Times endorsed three candidates in closely contested races: David Yassky in a Brooklyn congressional race; Ken Diamondstone in a race to represent a Brooklyn district in the state Senate; and Mark Green in the race for attorney general. All three candidates — Yassky, Diamondstone, and Green — lost. The New York Observer ran a 2,000-word article last year claiming that "It’s a given among the city’s political classes that an endorsement from The Times in a race for City Council, the State Legislature or a judgeship is tantamount to election in affluent, Times-reading neighborhoods." Not anymore.

The day after a Primary always have a few losing candidates, their supporters and gullible reporters talking about "demanding a recount".

Let’s make it clear. There are no recounts in New York because there hasn’t been an official count yet.

The results that are out there now are unofficial. They are called in by election inspectors after the polls closed Tuesday night. Numbers are not double checked and mistakes are always made. No absentee, affadavit or emergency ballots have been counted yet.

In the next week or two, the Board of Elections will conduct the official count by recording the numbers off the machines and counting the paper ballots.

I had been planning to post an argument that we should move New York’s Primary date but today’s New York Sun shows that Chris Owens, Yvette Clarke, Jonathan Tasini and of all people Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver beat me to it.

Silver, in fact, has co-sponsored a bill to move the Primary to the 3^rd Thursday in June.

The argument in that because the media has, and presumably will continue to focus so much on the anniversary of the September 11^th attacks and there is now such much pressure on candidates never to campaign on September 11^th, turnout in the Primary is depressed.