Women’s Equality Party Apparently Files Defective List of Party Officers and Bylaws

According to Michael Drucker’s story at TheIndependentView, the documents recently filed by the New York Women’s Equality Party, listing party officers and bylaws, are legally defective.

When a group that had not previously been a qualified party polls at least 50,000 votes for Governor, it becomes a qualified party in New York. However, it must then file a list of its officers and its bylaws. The documents must be signed by a majority of the group’s statewide candidates in the preceding general election. The Women’s Equality Party nominated four statewide candidates (all of them were also the Democratic and Independence Party nominees). Only two of them signed the documents. The party’s nominees for Attorney General and Comptroller did not sign the documents. This may mean that the Women’s Equality Party won’t be able to function as a qualified party in this year’s elections.

The two candidates who didn’t sign are Eric Schneiderman, the state’s Attorney General, and Tom DiNapoli, the state Comptroller. It is likely that they are sophisticated in matters of election law and they are deliberately not interested in helping establish the Women’s Equality Party; this does not appear to be an accident. It is plausible that the Working Families Party asked Schneiderman and DiNapoli to abstain from signing. The Working Families Party opposed Governor Andrew Cuomo’s idea of creating the Women’s Equality Party.

The New York November 2014 ballot did not let voters choose to vote for Schneiderman or DiNapoli on the Women’s Equality line. Instead the ballot put the label “Women’s Equality” inside the same box on the ballot that was used for voters to vote for those two candidates on the Independence Party line.


Comments

Women’s Equality Party Apparently Files Defective List of Party Officers and Bylaws — 4 Comments

  1. They may be misinterpreting Election Law ยง6-128.4.

    That section says that “[i]f there is any question or conflict relating to the rules or the rule-making body”, that the rules adopted by a property authorized body that were certified by a majority of the candidates shall be deemed to be the rules. “The certificate of such candidates describing the rule-making body shall be controlling.”

    So my interpretation is that the interim state committee promulgated the rules, and that Governor Cuomo and Lt. Governor Hochul are certifying that the interim state committee had that authority.

    Since Cuomo and Hochul aren’t WEP members, they can only certify who they believe to be the party bosses of the independent body that nominated them.

    If there is no question whether the rules are authoritative, then it does not matter whether the rules were only certified by two of the four 2014 WEP nominees.

    If there are an alternate set of rules filed, then the SBOE would have to sort matters out. I doubt that they would have any problem doing so, unless the alternate set were certified by both the other two nominees.

    Note: there ma be an internal conflict in the interim WEP rules II.2.a in that the interim state committee claims to have been elected by a majority of the WEP nominees. If the other two nominees were not given an opportunity to vote, the election may be void. Also it appears that the WEP nominees failed to elect a Vice Chair and Treasurer.

  2. How many DARK AGE States have ANTI-Democracy byzantine election laws ???

    A need to revive the 1864-1865 Union Army to liberate such States ???

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