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They’re Running for Office. That’s News to Them.

NEW YORK — This much is certain: Helen Gambichler is running for office.

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They’re Running for Office. That’s News to Them.
By
Andy Newman
and
Tyler Pager, New York Times

NEW YORK — This much is certain: Helen Gambichler is running for office.

She is the Queens Democratic Party bosses’ nominee for a spot on a little-known body called the Democratic County Committee.

County committee members are the very blades of grass of grass-roots politics in New York, the worker ants of participatory democracy. There are more than 1,100 Democratic committee members in Queens alone, most representing only a few blocks, all of them unpaid. Collectively, though, they have the power — at least in theory — to choose candidates for higher office and even determine party policy.

There is just one problem: Gambichler, a 72-year-old retired court clerk, did not know she was running for anything. Nor does she wish to run. “I have no idea what that’s about,” she said.

She had been nominated, without her knowledge, by the borough’s Democratic Party leadership, which is struggling to maintain control after the longtime Queens party chairman, Rep. Joseph Crowley, was trounced by left-leaning insurgent Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in a June congressional primary that sent tremors through the Democratic establishment nationwide.

Gambichler is hardly alone. The New York Times called dozens of the Queens party machine’s nominees for county committee. The candidates for 21 seats were running without their consent.

Most of these candidates did not know they were running at all until a reporter told them; two, including Gambichler, found out when they got letters from the city Board of Elections showing how their names would appear on the Sept. 13 primary ballot. Only four candidates The Times spoke to said they were running on purpose.

The total number of unsuspecting candidates could be considerably higher: Party leaders fielded more than 1,300 nominees, at least a hundred more than in the last race in 2016.

What’s more, the machine is press-ganging nominees even as reform-minded candidates seeking the same entry-level seats at the table, inspired by Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders, are being disqualified in droves for falling afoul of complex filing rules.

It is not entirely clear why the party would want to populate the committee with people who did not know they were on it. But any seats filled by party candidates would not be filled by insurgents.

Many of the machine’s unwitting soldiers are elderly or in poor health, and were confused or upset to learn of their political careers from a reporter’s phone call.

“There’s no such thing,” said Harold Haber, 94.

“What committee?” asked Bridget Knapp, 74.

“I would never run, never,” said Dorothea Barulich, 74. “I don’t know where they got that from.”

One nominee, Arlene Dudkin-Sachs, 76, said she had moved to Florida 2 1/2 years ago. But it turns out she is already on the committee, having been the machine candidate in 2016, too.

County committee candidates do not appear on a ballot unless they have an opponent. If they are unopposed, nominating papers accepted by the city Board of Elections are all that’s required to put them in office.

Some candidates, like Gambichler, are running for two county committee seats at once, a situation of questionable legality as they can serve in only one.

In one of Gambichler’s districts, there is a Democrat who would love to serve. Unlike Gambichler, she even lives in the three-square-block electoral district in Astoria she seeks to represent and collected signatures from her neighbors.

Her name is Aisha Riaz, and she is a member of the New Queens Democrats, part of the nationwide progressive movement seeking to overhaul what it sees as a moribund Democratic Party.

But Riaz was disqualified on a paperwork technicality by the Board of Elections. So were more than 60 other New Queens Democrats.

“It’s shocking a little bit,” Riaz, a 37-year-old lawyer, said when told of her opponent’s involuntary candidacy. “You’d think at least they would find someone who wanted the seat.”

Jesse Rose, the treasurer of the New Queens Democrats, said that the bosses were suffocating the party to save themselves.

“The fact that they’re running candidates who are unaware that they’re even running — against activists who want to be part of the process — is just obscene to me,” said Rose, who is also a lawyer and Riaz’s husband.

The Queens County Democratic Party’s executive secretary, Michael Reich, said in a statement: “We are not aware of people being designated without being informed.”

Though the party’s longtime law chairman signed off on nominating petitions for many of the conscripted candidates, Reich said it was the local clubs and party members who submitted names and that it was “incumbent upon them to determine that the proposed members have no objections to serving.”

Many nominees said they had attended Democratic club meetings in the past and guessed that was how local leaders had found their names.

The position of county committee member dates back to the days before radio and television, when party chiefs anointed “block captains” to get out the vote, said Martin Connor, a former Democratic state senator turned election lawyer.

“It was an important office,” Connor said. “The local committeeman would put a soapbox on a street corner and make speeches.” An 1898 law allowed any enrolled party member to run for committee in a primary.

On paper, the committees’ duties include vetting candidates for judge and for legislative openings that must be filled by a special election, which happen often. A 2017 study found that a third of New York City’s state legislators entered office via special election.

In practice, county committees usually rubber-stamp the leaders’ picks. In Queens, the committee meets every two years. Rose of the New Queens Democrats, who served several terms on county committee, said the meetings typically lasted minutes, were attended by a tiny fraction of members, and consisted mostly of “yea” votes for candidates by acclamation.

The New Queens Democrats’ list of proposed reforms does not seem particularly radical. They want regular meetings with more notice, a website that includes contacts for party leaders and closer scrutiny of the candidates that the party endorses.

But those seeking examples of the power county committees can wield need look no further than Manhattan, where renegade Democrats are trying to oust the party chairman, Keith Wright, over a backroom deal he made for a state Senate seat.

Many who want to shake up the system say that the Board of Elections, whose commissioners are also chosen by county political bosses, is part of the problem. Critics say the board makes it unnecessarily complicated to run, in part to discourage newcomers and aid the machine.

In Queens, more than two dozen insurgent candidates had their nominations invalidated by the board for errors on a form called an amended cover sheet. Last week, a State Supreme Court judge ordered those candidates reinstated, because the sheets were not required in the first place.

The board appealed, arguing that the insurgents were a day late to challenge their disqualifications. As of Thursday, it had succeeded in getting them thrown off again.

“It’s disheartening to learn that the Board of Elections, a body that is supposed to be upholding the law, is willing to go to such great lengths in order to try to keep people from getting on the ballot when the court has ruled that they should be on the ballot,” said Rose, who represented the insurgents.

A spokeswoman for the board, Valerie Vazquez-Diaz, responded to a request for comment about the criticisms by sending a link to its 26-page petition rules, noting: “They include samples of all necessary forms.”

Meanwhile, Gambichler said she called the board last month to de-nominate herself, to no avail. “They said ‘We looked into it, it’s a mistake,'” and told her it was being taken care of, she said. But as of Wednesday, weeks after the deadline for filing to run had closed, she was still a candidate for two seats.

While there are many ways to violate election law, running candidates without telling them is not one of them, according to the state Board of Elections, which oversees the city board.

“No violation,” wrote John Conklin, a state board spokesman. “They can decline the nomination within four days of its having been filed.”

But most of the unwitting candidates said they received no notification, making it impossible for them to decline in time.

If someone winds up on county committee and does not want to serve, Conklin wrote, they can resign “and the chair can fill the vacancy at the organizational meeting.”

Notwithstanding the state board’s position, in 1978, a state appellate court ruled that “a fraud was committed on the enrolled voters of the party” when candidates were run without consent.

Complaints about nonconsenting candidates crop up with some regularity. In 2016, an unsuccessful lawsuit in the Bronx alleged, among other things, that the party ran dead people for some seats.

Rose said he would like to represent unwitting Queens candidates in a similar suit. But one of them, Kathleen Dunphy, in her 80s and homebound, expressed little interest in fomenting rebellion.

“As long as it’s not costing me money, that’s OK,” Dunphy said of the county committee post. “All I know is that whatever it is, I won’t be there.”

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