Political Whisperer
By Robert Hornak
Robert Hornak is a veteran political consultant who has previously worked for the NYC office of the Republican Assembly Leader and served as Executive Director of the Queens Republican Party. He can be reached at rahornak@gmail.com and @roberthornak on X.
New York is notorious for its complex and hyper-technical ballot access laws. In plain English, NY makes it very difficult for candidates to get on the ballot to run for office.
Yes, NY has, over the decades, eliminated some of the many byzantine rules that candidates must adhere to. For example, the color of the paper that petitions were printed on were set by law, with Democrats mandated to use green paper and Republicans a pale pink, often called Salmon. Now, plain white paper is acceptable, although the colors are still used to preserve tradition.
While many rules like this were loosened, NY remains one of the most difficult states to become a candidate for local office on the official election ballot.
A case in Queens that is going before State Supreme Court and simultaneously before the judgement of the commissioners of the NYC Board of Elections, just may expose how ridiculous we have allowed this process to become.
State Assemblywoman Jenifer Rajkumar is running for reelection and is required to get the signatures of 500 valid registered Democrats that reside in her district. For those unfamiliar with the process, here’s how it works.
A petition form is created based on a template provided by the Board of Elections. It includes the names, addresses and office being sought for every candidate included on the petition. On some slate petitions that can be a dozen or more candidates running for everything from congress to judges or party offices like committeeman.
The number of signatures required varies by office, with 500 valid signatures generally needed to run for Assembly. The bigger the district the more signatures are required. That’s the advantage of the slate petition, the ones that county organizations put out. They have many different candidates carrying the same petition, dividing up the work among multiple campaigns.
In NYC, where Democrats outnumber Republicans approximately 6-1, a volunteer can stand on a busy street corner or in front of a supermarket and about every other or every third person will be a registered Dem. Some petitioners also go door to door working with lists of targeted voters, and while more accurate, this is a much slower lower yield process. Rajkumar collected approximately 2500 signatures, five times the required number.
The problem with that is you never know who you are talking to and if they will sign legitimately or even legibly. And this appears to be the case with Rajkumar. Her challenger, David Orkin, is alleging that Rajkumar petitioners forged nine signatures. Including one from an Orkin volunteer who claims he did not sign.
Orkin is claiming that the nine alleged forgeries were made by seven different witnesses. And because of that he is asking the court to invalidate every signature collected by those seven witnesses, alleging what the courts call permeation of fraud.
Traditionally that argument is made for petitions where so many of the signatures appear to be fraudulent that it calls into question the validity of the entire petition, regardless of how many other signatures were legitimately collected.
The classic way of forging signatures insiders call table top petitioning. It’s where a group of people pass petitions around a table and sign the names of voters off a list often purchased from the BOE. It’s still done to this day, even though highly illegal, as it’s hard to prove. But experienced campaign hands can recognize the patterns with a quick look.
But people who want to mess up an opponent will sometimes see a petitioner for the opposition and pretend to want to sign, then sign another name. It could be Mickey Mouse, or it could be a recognizable name that will get attention.
Bottom line is nobody bothers forging just one or two signatures. Why would they when they collected hundreds of real signatures. What is happening to Rajkumar appears to be a dirty trick, or just an overzealous opponent looking for attention, using a complicated and confusing process to make his opponent look like she’s acting illegitimately when in fact this is just the system as it is designed to operate – a hot mess that screams for reform.
