Albany DA Investigating Alleged Duplicate Signatures on NY GOP Gubernatorial Nominee Lee Zeldin’s Petitions

Albany DA Investigating Alleged Duplicate Signatures on NY GOP Gubernatorial Nominee Lee Zeldin’s Petitions

The Albany Times-Union reported that the Albany County District Attorney’s office and state Board of Elections started investigating possible “duplicate signatures” on nomination petitions for GOP gubernatorial nominee Lee Zeldin.

Less than two months until the election, and this just now pops up? Don’t they realize people will be suspicious, especially since Zeldin has a shot at beating current Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul?

The investigation does not include Zeldin’s campaign since New York’s Republican Party was in charge of the petitions “under the direction of John F. Haggerty, Jr., a longtime GOP operative from Queens who serves in a leadership role for the state party, according to a person briefed on the work.”

From The Albany Times-Union:

Investigators initially suspected the roughly 11,000 duplicate signatures, which were photocopied at the state Republican Party headquarters in Albany, had been inserted in the petitions due to a clerical error. But investigators are now examining whether there are potential criminal charges because it appears the duplicate signatures were deliberately mixed into the petitions, a source with knowledge of the investigation said. They were filed just before a May 31 deadline but — without the photocopied signatures — were well short of the minimum 45,000 needed to secure the third-party line for Zeldin.

The investigation is focusing on who took part in the photocopying and whether top GOP party officials directed or sanctioned the effort.

“Nothing could’ve gone out the door without his knowledge,” a Republican Party source said, referring to Haggerty’s supervisory role in the organization.

Zeldin was going to run on the Independence Party line as well, but the BOE stopped that in July.

An investigation “invalidated nearly 13,000 signatures” on those nomination petitions.

The campaign submitted 52,000 signatures but only needed 45,000. Without those 13,000 signatures, Zeldin could not be on that party line:

Zeldin’s petitions were challenged by officials with the New York Libertarian Party, who not only contested the signatures were invalid but also noted that about 11,000 of them were photocopied duplicates.

“Republicans talk a lot about election integrity, but the Zeldin campaign attempted to fly under the radar and submit over 11,000 fraudulent signatures in an attempt to get a third line on the ballot,” Andrew Kolstee, secretary of the Libertarian Party, said in a news release Thursday.

The Independence Party line investigation spurred the Democrats to demand an investigation into the Republican Party line nomination since those “dubious petitions” were found at the Republican Party headquarters.

More from The Albany Times-Union:

Jessica Proud, a spokeswoman for the state Republican Party, previously confirmed that the Independence Party petitions were dropped at the Republican Party headquarters on State Street in Albany — and bound in volumes at the party office — before submission to the state Board of Elections.

Of 52,000 signatures submitted, more than 11,000 were determined by the Board of Elections to be photocopies of other, original signatures within those same records. The copied pages were interspersed in a manner leading some election experts to conclude their inclusion may have been intentional, possibly to inflate the number of signatures to surpass the daunting new threshold of 45,000 valid signatures for upstart state parties to gain ballot access.

Proud had said last month that no one in the Republican Party knew how the copies became integrated with original signatures, and that their inclusion was inadvertent. She said hundreds of volunteers across the state collected signatures, handed them off to other volunteers and then dropped them off at various locations including GOP headquarters in Albany, where signatures were “being collected and dropped off up until minutes before the filing deadline.”

However, Proud said something different before:

Proud previously said the signature pages were bound into volumes at GOP headquarters with more than 20 volunteers, interns and staff “frantically pulling together the hundreds of pages of signatures” at the last minute. They were “hole-punching and binding, rushing to get them in before it was too late.”

“Whether for record-keeping or data entry purposes, it is a very common procedure for copies to be made of petitions by campaigns and even individuals who gather signatures,” Proud had said. “The process was chaotic and as a result, copies of the valid signatures were inadvertently included in the filing. The mistake was acknowledged and the [Board of Elections] decision to rule the petitions invalid was accepted with no further action taken.”

Either way, Proud might be correct when she said the investigation is “politically motivated.”

A recent Trafalgar Group poll found Zeldin “is within a single-digit margin of winning” the election.

Zeldin defeating Hochul would be considered “a major upset.” New York is a firm blue state, and Hochul took over after disgraced Gov. Andrew Cuomo resigned in August 2021:

A Trafalgar Group poll conducted from August 31 to September 1 found that Zeldin trailed Hochul by less than 5 percentage points. The survey marks the best polling for Zeldin in months, but still shows Hochul as the likely winner.

Zeldin won support from 43.4 percent of poll respondents, while Hochul secured support from 47.8 of the respondents. The poll surveyed 1,091 respondents and has a margin of error of 2.9 percent.

But FiveThirtyEight has Hochul up 51.8% and Zeldin at 38.1%.

Here is a report about the Independence Party line petitions:

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