From AMNY: Melissa Mark-Viverito is looking to get back into city public office.
The former City Council speaker announced Tuesday that she plans to run in next year's special election for public advocate. Mark-Viverito, who first announced her bid on "Mornings on 1," will kick off her campaign with an evening event at Borough of Manhattan Community College.
She has said she would hold city and state leaders accountable over the state of the city's transit system, ongoing problems at New York City Housing Authority developments and issues of inequality, as public advocate.
As New Yorkers begin a year of many voting opportunities, there are important questions that elections will help answer - like who the next U.S. President will be and which party will control the state Senate - but also concern about voter fatigue and thus, turnout.
There will be at least four chances for New Yorkers to cast votes in 2016, with three different primary election days leading up to November’s general election. There will be a presidential primary vote in April; congressional primaries in June; and state legislative primaries in September. There will also be special elections sprinkled in to fill empty seats in the state Assembly and Senate.
On April 19, New Yorkers will vote in their party primaries for president; on June 28, it will be primaries for all 27 New York members of the House of Representatives, with Senator Chuck Schumer on the ballot, too; and on September 13, primaries for all 63 seats of the State Senate and all 150 seats of the State Assembly.
No date has been set by the governor yet for special elections in the state legislature, including those to replace former Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver and former Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos, whose 2015 corruption convictions created vacancies.
In 2015, some New York City voters cast ballots for new district attorneys, judges, and city Council members, among others. By the time New Yorkers vote for president in November, it could be their sixth trip to the polls in 14 months.
As for the election in the 23rd Council district, the voting in that election was confined to residents of Oakland Gardens, Queens Village, Fresh Meadows, Floral Park, New Hyde Park, Glen Oaks, Hollis Hills, Douglaston, Bayside, Little Neck, and Bellerose.
In the only election that might result in an upset, the race to fill the City Council vacancy in the 23rd district, the unofficial returns show candidates Barry Grodenchik (Democrat) and Rebecca Lynch (Working Families Party) are close, and it may take a full vote count to determine the winner. A third candidate in that race, Joseph Concannon (Republican) doesn’t figure in the full count.
NY1's results show something much, much different.
Mark Weprin officially left the City Council on Sunday, June 14 — apparently three days too late for a non-partisan special election to fill his seat.
Mayor Bill de Blasio proclaimed on Monday that the vacancy will be filled at the Nov. 3 general election, and that the political parties will nominate candidates for the election in the Sept. 10 primary.
According to a spokesperson for the city Board of Elections, a non-partisan special election cannot occur if the vacancy occurs between 60 and 90 days of the scheduled September primary. Had Weprin resigned before June 11, the mayor would have been obligated to call a non-partisan election.
Weprin had announced in May he would step down from the City Council to join the Cuomo administration as deputy secretary for legislative affairs. At the time, he said he would leave within two weeks, but ultimately delayed his departure.
Following the traditional election format now leads to a competitive Democratic primary among previously announced candidates including former Assemblyman Barry Grodenchik; Rebecca Lynch, former assistant commissioner with the New York City Community Affairs Unit; Celia Dosamantes, former aide to Assemblyman David Weprin and Rep. Grace Meng; attorney Ali Najmi; and former City Council candidate Bob Friedrich.
Assemblyman William Boyland Jr. has been convicted on federal corruption charges today, according to a spokesperson for U.S. Attorney Loretta Lynch.
Mr. Boyland was convicted on all 21 counts accusing him of four schemes, including a top count of attempted extortion while serving as an elected official.
The Brownsville assemblyman, hailing from one of Brooklyn’s most prominent political families, was indicted on corruption charges previously but was found not guilty.
Now that Mr. Boyland has been convicted, he will be expelled from his chamber, and his seat will remain vacant until Gov. Andrew Cuomo calls a special election–which he has been reluctant to do–or until the next election. Multiple candidates have already declared their intentions to run for the seat.
Mr. Boyland was immediately taken into custody, according to the New York Post. The assemblyman faces up to the 30 years behind bars.
A name familiar to millions of New Yorkers could enter a volatile Queens City Council race.
Rudy S. Giuliani, chief of staff to Republican Councilman Eric Ulrich and second cousin to the former mayor of the same name, is mulling a run for indicted GOP Councilman Dan Halloran’s seat, multiple sources told Politicker.
Mr. Giuliani is perhaps the only candidate who could keep the seat in their party’s possession, two GOP sources argued, since Mr. Halloran was arrested two weeks ago for participating in an alleged bribery scheme and the Republican Party lacks a deep bench in the northeastern Queens district. The sources said Mr. Ulrich is encouraging Mr. Giuliani to run for the seat if Mr. Halloran does not seek re-election.
A special election, which would automatically occur if Mr. Halloran resigned or is convicted of a felony, could present a unique opportunity for a Republican candidate. A crowded field Democrats are already vying for the competitive seat, and as councilmanic special elections are non-partisan, a unified Republican front would be hard to defeat.
Dennis Saffran, a Republican who ran against Mr. Halloran’s predecessor, Democrat Tony Avella, in 2001, may also be weighing another run for the seat. Last year, Mr. Giuliani passed on his own bid against Mr. Avella, who’s now in the State Senate.
Donovan Richards declared victory today in the Queens special election to replace his mentor, former Councilman James Sanders, putting to rest fears that the election’s outcome would be unknown for weeks or even months in what had become a racially-charged contest.
With all absentee and affidavit votes counted, Mr. Richards padded his razor-thin 26-vote Election Day margin with another 133 additional votes, while his main competitor, Pesach Osina, only gathered an additional 80. This brought the unofficial tally to 2,646 for Mr. Richards and 2,567 for Mr. Osina, a wide enough margin to avoid an automatic recount. The results will be certified next week.
Despite the fact that two City Council candidates had each claimed victory in southeast Queens’ special election, by the next night the city Board of Elections had yet to count the votes on a missing memory stick, and it may be weeks before an official winner is declared.
By Wednesday night Donovan Richards had a 26-vote lead over Pesach Osina, according to the board’s preliminary results, with paper and absentee ballots yet to be counted, as well as the votes on a missing, mystery memory stick used in electronic voting machines.
Both Richards and Osina had already declared themselves the winner by the early hours Wednesday morning and did not lay off throughout the day. Richards said the missing votes would come in from outside Osina’s Orthodox Jewish community and tweeted that his closest opponent “ran a hell of a campaign.”
Osina released a statement saying he expected to be the winner when the votes were counted.
“I’m confident that when all the votes are final, we will be victorious!” he said.
According to election law, however, the board will not begin counting affidavits and absentee ballots until Wednesday, and with such a scant margin separating the top two candidates, next week’s results could trigger an automatic recount.
A spokeswoman at the BOE said that if the margin of victory is less than 0.5 percent, a manual recount is automatically triggered, a process that could take weeks.
Candidates vying for former City Councilman James Sanders Jr.’s vacated District 31 seat is shaping up to be an eclectic cast of characters.
There will be a special run-off election on Feb. 19, open to any candidate who can collect the requisite signatures by mid-month, Mayor Bloomberg announced last week.
Sanders vacated his Council seat to assume his new role in the state Senate after defeating embattled incumbent Shirley Huntley.
The candidates must scramble to collect 1,350 signatures by Jan. 15 and then submit them to the city Board of Elections.
Thus far, former Councilman Alan Jennings and Selvena Brooks have filed their petitions with the board, according to spokeswoman Valerie Vazquez.
Brooks served as the deputy chief of staff to state Sen. Malcolm Smith and most recently worked with the politically active SEIU union.
The early frontrunner appears to be Donovan Richards, Sander’s former chief of staff. The outgoing councilman has thrown his weight behind his protege. Richards has not yet filed his petition with the Board of Elections as of Monday. A handful of other names have been rumored.
The protege is ready for the torch to be passed to him.
City Councilman James Sanders Jr.’s primary victory last week over scandal-torn state Sen. Shirley Huntley unofficially kicked off the race for his Council seat several months earlier than expected.
Sanders (D-Laurelton) will have to vacate his Council post before he can be sworn in to the state Senate, triggering in a special election in early 2013.
Donovan Richards, Sanders’ chief of staff, has been gearing up for the race even before Sanders bested the incumbent of Senate District 10.
Bronx City Councilman Larry Seabrook was convicted Thursday on nine counts of corruption and wire fraud in Manhattan Federal Court. in Manhattan.
Seabrook, 61, who was retried following a mistrial in December, misdirected $1.5 million of taxpayer money that was supposed to go to community groups to his own pocket, U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara said.
"Today's conviction ensures that the Councilman will pay for betraying the public trust. Rooting out public corruption and restoring the public's faith in honest government remains a vital mission of this office," he said in a statement.
The mayor's office has indicated that Seabrook will be removed from office and a special election will be held to determine who will finish his term.
Queens Democratic leaders are so worried that the ethical and criminal probes surrounding Rep. Gregory Meeks will bring him down, they held a secret meeting to pick his successor.
The clandestine cabal assembled last month at the Guy Brewer Democratic Club in Queens and included the borough’s Democratic boss, Rep. Joseph Crowley, according to two elected officials familiar with the gathering.
But the handpicked successor, state Sen. Malcolm Smith, seems a curious choice because he is under federal investigation himself.
“It would send a terrible signal to DC,” a source said of Smith’s coronation. “We would be the...joke of the country.”
Smith was at the meeting, along with City Council members Ruben Wills and Leroy Comrie, according to sources.
Meeks is up for re-election next year in a heavily minority and immigrant district that covers southeast Queens. If Meeks resigns or is expelled from Congress, the governor could call a special election to fill the seat or leave it vacant until the November 2012 elections.
A primary against Meeks is not being mulled because the embattled congressman’s premature exit is assumed, a source said.
Had to laugh at Joe's assertion, "I've never set foot inside the Guy Brewer Democratic Club."
Aren't you the Democratic county leader? Oh that's right, the commute from Virginia is a bitch.
Republican Bob Turner captured the seat vacated by long-time Democratic Representative Anthony Weiner, upsetting Democrat David Weprin in Tuesday's special election.
With 66 percent of precincts reporting as of midnight, Turner had 53 percent of the vote to Weprin's 47 percent.
Turner's victory represents an historic upset in a district where Democrats outnumber Republicans by a 3-to-1 margin. The district hasn't had a Republican congressman since 1923.
"It's not over yet," Weprin said shortly after midnight, after NY1 and the Associated Press called the race for Turner. "There's still quite a few ballots to be counted."
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee is said to be in panic mode over the prospect of David Weprin losing to Bob Turner in the special election for the Ninth Congressional District. An accumulation of gaffes, bad press and too-close-for-comfort poll numbers have fueled this perception. Even House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi is said to be raising money for the campaign, though has yet to commit to headlining a fundraiser.
As one of the lone special elections in an otherwise dreary political year, the race is being held up as a bellwether for everything from President Obama’s re-election efforts, to the administration’s policies toward Israel, to the public’s fears about the economy, to gay marriage. But for many New York Democrats, the race is much simpler: an unexpectedly tight race in a reliably Democratic district.
“The DCCC is definitely panicking,” said one New York Democratic operative. “Even Nancy Pelosi is raising money to avoid the embarrassment of Weprin losing.”
In just under one week, Jacobs and about 10 of his volunteers had collected more than 1,600 signatures. After being told by the Queens Democrats that there wasn’t time to interview him to determine whether he could be a viable candidate for the party as they instead chose Michael Simanowitz, a former aide to Mayersohn, Jacobs was ecstatic that he might still be able to make a bid for the seat that represents the neighborhood where he has lived nearly his entire life.
Then, however, the city Board of Elections ruled last week that Jacobs’ signatures were invalid because he had not written the number of the Assembly district on top of each page of signatures.
“I followed the New York laws and rules regarding the Independence nomination, and I did everything that the petition form from the Board of Elections said to do,” Jacobs said. “Nowhere on the sample form did it say I had to have the Assembly district number on top of every single page. It’s upsetting.”
For a number of good government groups across the state, Jacobs’ situation is representative of New York’s tedious election laws, which they argue seriously deter people other than the party favorites from running for office.
“The function of all these convoluted rules is to protect the established parties from insurgent parties and to protect the established office holders from insurgents,” said Michael Krasner, a political science professor at Queens College. “The fact that you can make a good living as an election lawyer, someone who’s an expert in minutiae in laws, shows how difficult it is for someone without that expertise to mount a challenge to a candidate from one of the major parties.”
While Gov. Cuomo has said he hopes to make election reform a priority next year, Krasner and others have expressed skepticism that legislators would want to change the current system that often gives them a great deal of stability.
How high are the odds stacked against independent candidates in special elections? Ask Justin Wax Jacobs, a college student who wanted to run for the Queens Assembly seat vacated by Nettie Mayersohn. He first asked a local district leader if he could interview for the Democratic nomination - but says his offer was flatly rejected. He then somehow gathered 1,600 signatures in six days to run as an independent. Yet even though he posed no real threat to Mayersohn's chief of staff Michael Simanowitz, Queens Democratic election lawyer Frank Bolz was on hand at a Board of Elections hearing Tuesday to make sure Jacobs was thrown off the ballot over a technicality.
In a special election, voters are denied the chance to choose nominees, as they would in an open primary. And, because the district is overwhelmingly Democratic, hand-picked candidates like Weprin romp in a special election without true public scrutiny or competition.
He and his family are masters at getting themselves appointed to office. Consider:
Weprin's father, Saul Weprin, was a product of the Queens machine who rose to be Assembly speaker. When he died in 1994, the party anointed David's brother Mark in a special election.
In 2001, David ran for City Council. He faced opposition in a primary, but the machine made his only real rival a judge. David won in a walk.
In 2009, David entered the only competitive election of his career, running for city controller. He finished fourth out of four in the primary.
A campaign highlight: Asked by this page what the controller's budget was, he said: "What office? The controller's office? Ummm. Good question. The controller's office budget. Ummm . . ."
Since David's Council seat was then open and he was jobless, brother Mark came to the rescue by running for Council. Mark won, creating an Assembly vacancy, which the party boss filled, you guessed it, by making David the candidate in a special election.
And now, barring a GOP miracle, he will be off to Congress, never having won a true election in his entire career.
By the way, Crowley - who won his own seat in Congress by bypassing a primary - will then fill Weprin's vacated Assembly seat in yet another uncompetitive special election.
When it comes to New York’s suddenly vacant Ninth Congressional seat, Elizabeth Holtzman is not exactly playing it coy.
She wants the job.
“I could hit the ground running,” she said of the post, now up for grabs since Representative Anthony D. Weiner resigned. “I know I could fight effectively for the people of this district. I was in Congress.”
Ms. Holtzman, the youngest woman to be elected to Congress, represented Brooklyn in the House from 1973 to 1981, later becoming the district attorney in Brooklyn and comptroller for New York City.
In a telephone interview the other day, Ms. Holtzman said she had already expressed her interest in the job to Representative Joseph Crowley, the head of the Democratic Party in Queens, who will play an influential role in selecting the party’s nominee. A special election is scheduled for Sept. 13, and there will be no primaries — instead, party leaders will select the candidates, and at this point there is no indication whom they have in mind.
A new name is making the rounds in political circles as a replacement for the now ex-congressman Anthony Weiner: City Councilwoman Elizabeth Crowley.
The 33-year-old lawmaker would be an intriguing choice since she is the cousin of the man who will have more say than anyone over who takes the seat: Congressman and Queens County Democratic Party leader Joe Crowley.
She beat Republican Anthony Como in 2008 after losing to him in a special election earlier in the year in a district that skews relatively conservative and in a race that Congressman Crowley made a major priority of the county party.
The county party will decide who runs on the Democratic line for the seat, which should almost certainly decide who ends up winning.
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