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Petitioning season formally wraps at the beginning of April during New York election years, kicking off the true contest of out-lawyering fellow candidates to get their names knocked off the ballot for the next month. Accusations of signature fraud abound in this objection period, leaving the New York City Board of Elections (BOE) and the courts with the task of sorting through it all. 

Operating within the newly adopted city and state designating petition guidelines, which drill down on terms and rules, the NYC BOE held its commissioner’s cover sheet review on April 19 and then an encompassing seven-hour-long, at times combative, commissioner’s hearing on April 23 to review the bulk of these claims of election fraud.

“So the motion is made and seconded? Candidate is off the ballot” is what a commissioner would say, often with little fanfare.

Every petition form is presumed to be valid upon filing if it contains enough signatures for the candidate’s desired office. Any registered voter can then challenge the validity of a petition, usually within a few days of the last filing date. In the best cases, objectors will challenge several candidates in a race or multiple races and the BOE will find the claims against them invalid. They’re safe and on the ballot until the state primary on June 25. 

In undesirable circumstances, candidates or their representatives are harangued, scrutinized, dragged through the mud by their opponents, sued, overburdened with the sheer bureaucracy of the electoral system, or kicked off the ballot by the BOE. In the worst cases, criminal charges are filed against a candidate with possible prison time eventually, but experts consider that rare.

It’s a delicate routine that most candidates running for elected office dutifully leave in the hands of election attorneys if they can afford to do so. 

“Petitioning challenging is an age-old practice where often, party organizations seek to knock off challengers from the ballot,” said New York Law School Professor Jeffrey M. Wice, who specializes in ​​redistricting, voting rights, and census law. “New York makes it complicated and time-consuming—petition challenges are often successful because of clerical mistakes, illegible writing. There’s a number of reasons a candidate can be removed from the ballot if there are enough fraudulent or incorrect signatures.” 

Because of the high level of competition between all candidates, some resort to shadier tactics, like forging dates on signatures or signing dead people’s names. Black and brown candidates are not immune to this. 

Assemblymember Eddie Gibbs, who is running for re-election to the Assembly in the 68th District and is a district leader, has had a penchant for digging up election fraud since 2013 because of his lowkey rivalry with district leader Johnathan Ruiz. “We would first work together and then we actively started supporting different candidates and running against each other,” said Gibbs as he headed out to check with residents about their signatures last week. “The first time he beat me, I looked at his petitions thoroughly and I was like, ‘These are good signatures,’ so I didn’t bother [to challenge]. The second time, I saw the same pattern on signatures, so I went to the BOE and started putting in names and you see them in red—that means these people are deceased. I said, ‘Let me walk to the door.’And I take the signature to folks and they are pissed.”

According to the current BOE New York County’s recorded objection ledger, Gibbs has had his own petitions challenged by a few people, including his opponent in the Assembly race, Xavier Santiago. Gibbs also challenged Santiago and candidate William Smith. But his main targets were 68th District leader candidates Juhaib Choudhury, Nina Saxon, and Ruiz. 

Gibbs planned on suing all three based on incorrect dates and improper witnesses—the latter is a serious violation he said he found in their petitioning forms. Witnesses to petition signatures have to be accurately reported and aren’t usually the candidates themselves. Gibbs’s sleuth team double-checked the dates and people collected through residents’ home security cameras.   

Some candidates have the double worry of being targeted because of their race or ethnicity, especially if they’re the only person of color running for an office in a primarily white district or county. Such is the situation for Westchester County District Attorney candidate William Wagstaff III, who is running against DA candidate Susan Cacace to replace DA Miriam Rocah. 

To summarize, Wagstaff received complaints from his volunteer petitioners and multiple people who had signed petitions for his candidacy that they were being “menaced, intimidated, and threatened” by investigators hired by Cacace to question the validity of the petitions they signed, according to his campaign. Wagstaff’s team slammed the tactic as an attempt to disenfranchise voters, specifically Black voters, in Westchester. By April 14, Cacace filed a lawsuit alleging that Wagstaff had committed election fraud by submitting “improperly witnessed signatures.” 

The Westchester community corralled huge support for Wagstaff with a rally in front of the Westchester County courthouse. Mount Vernon Mayor Shawyn Patterson-Howard, who nominated Wagstaff, said at the rally that she has no qualms with Cacace hiring campaign staff to confirm petition signatures, and has challenged signatures herself. “But what I do have a problem with is the intimidation tactics that were used to disenfranchise my constituents and women, because I believe 80 percent of the people they went to challenge, to question and intimidate were women, Black women, and women from Mount Vernon,” Patterson-Howard said.

The courts ruled in favor of Wagstaff on April 25, allowing his name to appear on the ballot.

Sarah K. Steiner, one of the state’s leading election law practitioners, attended the BOE commissioner’s meeting this Tuesday on behalf of several Queens county candidates and said the Wagstaff accusations were “shameful,” in her opinion. “They misconstrued so much and turned something that was nothing into something they could get some headlines for before it all went away. I hate when that happens,” Steiner said. “It was done as a campaign technique. I don’t think anybody thought there was actual fraud.”

The BOE is now moving on to the fairly short appeals process for candidates who were removed from the ballot, determinations commence on May 1. Steiner said she doesn’t “necessarily” consider being removed from the ballot a sign that someone is unfit for office, but she thinks that the petitioning and objection process leaves a lot of room for “human error” as it stands now. She is in favor of reforming the traditional paper process to include electronic petitioning to reduce the likelihood of fraud claims.

Ariama C. Long is a Report for America corps member who writes about politics for the Amsterdam News. Your donation to match our RFA grant helps keep her writing stories like this one; please consider making a tax-deductible gift of any amount today by visiting https://bit.ly/amnews1.

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