Thank you for the valuable and useful information.
However, there may be many reasons why my candidates should not be given a
place on the ballot, but the only reasons that count are the reasons the
Board of Elections gave which was that the Subscribing witness to 3905 of
my petition signers were not registered Republicans.
My opposing contention will be that
1. The Specific Objections were not valid because they were not signed by
Sal Caruso. The signature at the bottom of the sheet is clearly not his
signature.
2. The objector claimed that all but 69 of my signatures were bad. They
claimed that I had 4269 signatures, but only 69 were good. The other 4200
were bad signatures.
Clearly they were just pulling numbers out of a hat. They had obviously
never checked the actual signatures that are on file with the Board of
Elections. They just made up these numbers. As a result, the Board of
Elections had to spend a huge number of staff hours over last weekend
checking on these frivolous objections. The Specific Objections claimed
that NONE of my subscribing witnesses were registered to vote. In reality,
all of my subscribing witnesses are registered to vote. They obviously did
not bother to check. However, one of my subscribing witnesses is registered
to vote in Syracuse New York. It would be understandable that they did not
find his voter registration. Another subscribing witness signed her name
Ann Fastag. That is her married name. She is registered to vote as Ann
Mazzella which is her maiden name (I believe). The Board of Elections
disallowed her signatures for that reason but as she only collected 110
signatures that did not change the result. All of the other subscribing
witnesses are registered to vote in New York City.
Once the Board of Elections could see that the Specific Objections were
false in that they claimed that NONE of the subscribing witnesses were
registered to vote whereas in reality ALL of them are registered to vote,
the Board of Elections should have proceeded no further. This alone made it
apparent that the Specific Objector had done a sloppy job and never really
bothered to check the signatures. The Board of Elections should not have
spent staff time checking an obviously frivolous objection.
I had an opportunity to meet the Objector Sal Caruso last night. I asked
him how he got involved in this. He is an elderly man in his late-60s. He
said that he is a Republican and the party asked him to help out.
This shows that he is just a front man (as of course we always suspected).
Sal Caruso feels that he is doing the Party a favor by being a nominee
objector. I intend to raise this as an issue. We and the voters have a
right to know who the real objectors are. Who is paying the legal fees of
Daniel Szalkiewicz, the attorney who purportedly represents Sal Caruso? We
and the public have the right to know who is behind these objections.
There can be little doubt that the real objectors are either one of the
other Republican Candidates or else it is the Republican Leadership. We are
entitled to know that information.
Sam Sloan