Hearing Scheduled to Restore Republican Party Candidates to the Ballot

[samsloan]

Manhattan Judge Deborah A. Kaplan has signed an Order to Show Cause and Scheduled a Hearing to be Held on Monday, August 5, 2013 at 9:30 AM on a motion to restore Sam Sloan's slate of candidates to the ballot.

The hearing will be held in Part 7, Room 341 in the New York Supreme Court at 60 Centre Street, New York NY.

Sam Sloan's list of candidates were thrown off the ballot for one reason only which is that the petition signatures were not witnessed by Registered Members of the Republican Party.

The New York Board of Elections has long had an unwritten rule that Republican petition signatures must be witnessed by registered members of the Republican Party. Sloan did not know about this rule and thus did not have the requisite Republicans to witness the signatures on the petitions.

It is this rule more than any other that keeps challenges to the Republican Party leadership off the ballot. Even though the Republican Party regularly polls only 7% in New York City, they keep running the same losing candidates year after year because nobody can challenge them.

Sal Caruso, who signed the General Objection to keep Sam Sloan's candidates off the ballot, said last night that he is a member of the Republican Party and was asked to help out the party by signing the objection to the candidates. He did not seem to realize that by doing this he has necessarily been brought into a lawsuit.

[samsloan]

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