On May 13, the New York State Board of Elections removed Congressmember Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez from the Working Families Party primary ballot. She is running for re-election, and she wants the nomination of the Working Families Party. She is safely on the Democratic primary ballot so she doesn’t really need the WFP nomination. She needed 15 signatures but only had thirteen ballot. See this story.
Pathetic.
Only 15 signatures were needed…wow. Someone dropped the ball there. I mean, even in a pandemic that amount would be possible, especially for someone as popular as AOC. Even Greens like myself could probably get that many signatures if I had to (and luckily I didn’t need to since the court put myself, and a few other candidates on the ballot here in Illinois), just by asking a few eligible voters to print out the petition forms and properly fill them out and send them to us via mail, and let any of their friends and family members who are also eligible to sign know about it.
AOC! AOC! AOC! for the USA!
Can AOC get the Working Families Party nomination via write-in? That way, in the unlikely event she lost the Dem primary, she’d still be on the Nov. ballot as the Working Families’ nominee?
@Joshua,
In New York, the number of signatures on a designating petition is based on the number of enrolled members of the party. Under modified requirements for COVID-19 for Congress it is the lesser of 375 and 1.5% of enrolled members. In AOC’s district there are 972 WF members. 1.5% of 972 is 15. But those 15 signatures must be by registered members. About 1 in 350 voters are WF. If you randomly accosted 350 random voters, you would only find 1 WF voter. She may not understand you through your mask, and would be alarmed if you cleared your throat before speaking. You would need to provide a sterilized pen, and santize your clip board.
So instead you are going to need to get a list of WF voters, and make contact through phone. You wouldn’t want to go door knocking at this time.
For the Green, Libertarian, and SAM parties, only 10, 4, and 1 signatures, respectively are needed. But those signatures must come from 601, 205, or 3 members.
Par for the course in the NY RED Donkey communist State of chaos and anarchy
and control freak TYRANTS like the NY guv and NY city mayor.
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NO primaries.
One person nom pets by any voters
@Sam,
NY ballots always have a write-in space. But if there are no candidates or only one candidate seeking party nomination, the race is not on the primary ballot, and thus no write-in space.
New York has Opportunity To Ballot (OTB). Ballot is a verb, that is the voters would like an opportunity to vote for the nominee of their party. OTB is by petition, so it would have required 15 signatures from WF voters. If there is OTB, then the race will appear on the ballot regardless of the number of formal candidates, and there will be a write-in space.
Thanks for the specifics of New York ballot access Jim. I guess I was viewing the situation too much through the lens of Illinois’ system. NY state government (especially Cuomo) has been even more hostile towards granting modifications to the petitioning process than Illinois usually is (but this time around IL was surprisingly accommodating when we took them to court), so if NY is still absolutely requiring in-person petition signature gathering, I could understand why AOC failed. Nobody wants to or should be engaging in traditional ballot access petitioning right now.
JR —
primary = part of election process.
14-2 violation if NO primary write-ins allowed ???
@Joshua,
New York truncated the petitioning process, and reduced the number of signatures to 30% of the ordinary requirement. Ordinarily the deadline was April 3, but was cutoff at March 17. It could have been AOC was making a reasonable effort to get the 49 needed, but then was cut off.
It wasn’t the case that she only needed 15, and only managed to get 13.