It’s unclear which law enforcement agency would handle a possible investigation into Republican gubernatorial candidate Lee Zeldin’s campaign after the state Board of Elections invalidated thousands of duplicate petition signatures last month.
State Democratic Party leaders on Tuesday demanded answers from Zeldin’s campaign about who is responsible for the additional requests and a criminal investigation after the The Times Union first reported this week the 11,000 invalidated and duplicate petitions were gathered and bound at the state headquarters of the Republican Party in Albany.
“This is election fraud,” said New York State Democratic Committee Chairman Jay Jacobs. “If someone wants to become the governor, the chief law enforcement officer of New York State, at the very least, should be willing to demonstrate that they are going to uphold the law.”
Zeldin was removed as an Independence Party candidate after the state Board of Elections invalidated 11,000 photocopied petition signatures submitted on the last day of the May filing deadline, falling short of the required 45,000 signatures .
“Our campaign was not aware of any photocopying and did not make any photocopying,” Zeldin campaign spokeswoman Katie Vincentz said in a statement Tuesday. “Hochul is desperate for any distraction she can muster to take the heat off her pathetic support of cashless bail, Alvin Bragg, congestion pricing, and other terrible laws, policies, and politicians. The wild irony here is that Kathy Hochul s “has gained a rather infamous reputation in New York as the undisputed queen of scandal, abuse and paid corruption.”
Top state Democrats continue to call for Albany County District Attorney David Soares’ office to launch a criminal investigation into the photocopied and duplicate signatures submitted to get Zeldin’s name on a third-party line for the general election of November
Senate Elections Committee Chairman Zellnor Myrie emailed a letter to the Albany County District Attorney’s office requesting the investigation earlier this month.
The DA’s office continues to review the letter and the possibility of a criminal investigation along with the state Board of Elections (BOE).
The office has not requested or received the signatures or any other related information from the BOE as of Tuesday.
“We are engaged with the Electoral Board in this review [and] whatever happens will be at least partially a function of what their findings are,” said Albany County DA spokesman Darrell Camp.
Democratic leaders said Tuesday that they have not sent letters or requested that state Attorney General Letitia James’ office investigate the matter.
Jacobs stressed that the Albany DA is the right agency for the job.
“Any time there’s an issue of petition fraud, which is what this is, it’s generally handled by a district attorney, and I think that’s the best place to handle it,” Jacobs said.
A spokesman for state Democrats added that the petitions in question were filed and bound in Albany County, according to the Times Union report, so the county attorney’s office is the most appropriate agency .
A geographic or other conflict of interest would force the DA’s office to recuse itself from further review.
A state agency must refer the matter to the attorney general’s office for the AG to open a separate investigation.
The state Board of Elections did not return multiple requests for comment on the review or intent to refer the incident to the AG’s office.
“Since the petitions were filed and bound in Albany County, the district attorney’s office is the appropriate law enforcement entity for the complaint,” said Jerrel Harvey, director of communications for the Hochul campaign.
The attorney general’s office declined to comment Tuesday.
The state Board of Elections and the governor’s office did not return multiple requests for comment.
“The right to vote is sacred,” said Latrice Walker, D-Brooklyn, chairwoman of the Assembly Elections Committee. “It must be protected and respected at all costs.”
Zeldin’s campaign continued to push Attorney General Letitia James’ office to investigate Gov. Kathy Hochul’s office for awarding a multimillion-dollar contract to major campaign donors without following the state’s competitive bidding process, and awarding a multimillion-dollar contract to a person who recently hosted an in-person fundraiser for the governor.
New York State Republican Party spokeswoman Jessica Proud stressed that the duplicates were an inadvertent mistake amid the last-minute chaos before the filing deadline, as hundreds of volunteers from across the state they collected signatures and left them in various places.
“There is no greater perpetrator of corruption than the New York Democratic Party, which tried to steal the election with its illegal schemes to screw around and fill voter rolls with foreign nationals,” Proud said. Tuesday. “New York’s highest court, full of Democrat-appointed judges, slapped them down. They continue to show that they are just trying to distract from the real pay-to-play corruption going on inside Kathy Hochul’s administration.”
More than 20 volunteers, interns and staff frantically gathered hundreds of pages of signatures to submit to the Board of Elections, Proud said earlier this week, adding that it’s common for the party to make copies of campaign petitions.
