Challenging Phillips-Staley’s Petitions, Lawler Aims To Divide And Conquer Dem Rivals
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By Barrett Seaman—
With a week to go before the ballot for the June 23rd primary must be certified, Republican incumbent Congressman Mike Lawler’s campaign has charged Democratic candidate Effie Phillips-Staley with submitting a list of petitions containing fraudulent signatures. In a video released by his campaign, Lawler said that within days of the April 6 deadline for filing petitions, his team “spotted something that stopped us in our tracks:” the signature of one of his own interns, a student at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY. They continued to pore over Phillips-Staley’s petition and claimed to have found them to be “permeated” with 2,300 fraudulent signatures.
In court, however, according to Phillips-Staley’s camp, Lawler’s attorneys were able to substantiate only 30 fraudulent signatures out of a total of 2,900 filed. Phillips-Staley’s attorney argued that even if they conceded those 30 signatures as invalid, that left some 2,870 valid signatures—more than twice the minimum 1,250 required by the state Board of Elections.
The Board of Elections sustained Phillips-Staley’s petitions, but Lawler’s campaign continues to press the case in the Rockland County Supreme Court, where it is being heard by Judge David Fried.
Lawler’s legal team argues that by conceding that some signatures were fraudulent, Phillips-Staley was, in effect, admitting “that her petitions are riddled with fraud,” argued Ciro Riccardi, Lawler’s campaign manager. Moreover, Riccardi charged that both Cait Conley and Beth Davidson, Phillips-Staley’s two remaining rivals in the race to challenge Lawler, were complicit in her fraud by not publicly denouncing it. “Both Conley and Davidson constantly talk about fair elections and ‘protecting democracy,’ but the reality is that both of them are willing to accept fraud if it helps Democrats win,” he wrote.
Democrats see a different path—and a different motive. Effie herself went on social media to describe the outcome of their first court appearance court as “a bad day in court for Lawler. We prevailed on his ridiculous challenge to my WFP [Working Families Party] petitions, and he failed to substantiate any claims about my Dem petitions.
“This is Lawler’s attempt to disenfranchise thousands of Dems who signed my petitions, and it is going to fail,” she predicted. “Everything he says to the courts and to the public is a lie. Mark my words: he will lose in court and he’s going to lose to me in November.”
Challenging petitions is commonplace in elections, but many observers wonder why Lawler would go after Phillips-Staley, currently a distant third in the Democratic primary race, rather than the two front runners, Beth Davidson and Cait Conley. The answer may be buried in a small clause in New York State election law. The scenario might play out as follows:
In addition to her candidacy in the primary, Phillips-Staley has the endorsement of the progressive Working Families Party. By agreement with her two Democrat rivals, if she runs in the primary but loses to one of her two rivals, she would remove herself from the WFP line in the general so as not to risk siphoning votes off from the Democratic candidate.
If Judge Fried rules in favor of Lawler’s claims, however, and invalidates her petition, Phillips-Staley would be dropped from the June 23rd Democratic primary ballot. If she does not participate in the primary as a Democrat, a clause in New York election law (Section 6-146-6) would require her to remain on the WFP line in the general election, which would supercede her agreement with Davidson and Conley not to take votes away from the winner of the Democratic primary. The primary beneficiary of that outcome would be Mike Lawler.
The deadline for certifying petitions is April 30, leaving Judge Fried with less than a week to rule.
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