New York is holding a special election for Assembly, 43rd district, on May 5. The Democratic nominee is not on the ballot because the local party committee failed to file the certificate of nomination for him by the deadline. On April 27, the candidate, Guillermo Philpotts, filed a federal lawsuit to get on the ballot. Philpotts v Board of Elections in the City of New York, e.d., 15-cv-2366. However, on April 28, he lost the case.
The judge, Jack B. Weinstein, wrote, “Never having been nominated, plaintiff is not entitled to appear on the ballot. His Complaint is dismissed.” Philpotts had argued that the Board of Elections had a duty to notify him as soon as it was known that the party had missed the deadline, so that the error could be corrected. The decision does not actually address that argument.
Because no Democrat is on the ballot, and because the Republican Party is very weak in that Brooklyn district, it is expected that the winner will be either the Working Families Party nominee, or the Independence Party nominee.
Neither of those third party nominees are running as their party nominees, they are de facto Democrats. I truly want the Republican to win in this case, at least he is actually representing his party.
I lived in Crown Heights in that district as recently as October 2012, and the idea of a Republican winning in an overwhelmingly Caribbean-American and African-American district like that is laughable. The last Republican who carried that district was John Lindsay in 1969 running for reelection as mayor on the Liberal Party line.
For some reason it’s hard to get people to vote for you when you keep telling them their lives don’t matter.