Brooklyn Democratic Party bosses are waging trench warfare against insurgent reform candidates for district leader races in the borough, according to Hell Gate.
Members of the New Kings Democrats say the party, chaired by state Assemblymember Rodneyse Bichotte Hermelyn, has filed an unprecedented number of legal challenges that are designed to knock their district leader candidates off of the ballot ahead of the June 23 primary election.
Mark Hanna, an election lawyer for the New Kings, told Hell Gate that it's common for party leadership to challenge the petition signatures of district leader candidates. "To a degree it's almost like a hazing ritual, a rite of passage," said Hanna, who is himself a district leader.
Except this year, the party has challenged every single signature collected by four of the New Kings' 23 district leader candidates, claiming each one doesn't match the person's signature on their voter file—meaning that the court has had to review roughly 1,800 signatures, the news site reported.
The New Kings Democrats were originally running 24 district leader candidates, and the Brooklyn Democratic Party challenged seven of those candidates' petitions across five districts, Hell Gate reported.
To get on the ballot a district leader must have a petition with 500 valid signatures on it, and to get someone kicked off the ballot, the first step is to get the NYC Board of Elections to double-check that all of the signatures collected come from people who are registered Democrats in the district, who have not signed other petitions. The county party managed to get one New Kings candidate, Dion Quamina, knocked off the ballot this way, according to Hell Gate.
This chaos is helping to fuel a plan to eject Bichotte Hermelyn and take control of the party, by adding 10 new district leaders to their 13 incumbents in the June primary, thus giving reformers a majority of the 42 seats and the power to appoint their own leader. Success of this "Brooklyn Can't Wait" campaign would mean the end of an era for the county party machine, which has long worked to maintain its grip on power via backroom deals and pay-to-play relationships, the news site said.
Adam Davis, a member of the Kings County Democratic County Committee, wrote in a New York Daily News op-ed that he collected signatures as a volunteer for Bedford-Stuyvesant district leader candidates Carmella Charrington and Omar Hardy and witnessed how the BOE compared petition signatures against photocopies.
"If two signatures didn’t look identical at a glance, the signature was disqualified. Referees rarely do this work, receive no formal training, and know the exercise is as much guesswork as judgment. I watched referees strike a 79-year-old’s signature because it didn’t match from 1986. My own signature was challenged. Because I collected signatures, invalidating mine would have thrown out every petition I gathered," he wrote.
