Another Trump on the ballot
As her father runs for President, Ivanka Trump has won a Reform Party primary — and can run for Congress against Democratic Rep. Carolyn Maloney in November. What? You didn’t know that Ms. Trump was on the Reform Party congressional ballot in the 12th District, covering Manhattan’s East Side and parts of Brooklyn and Queens?
Surely, she had no idea either. But there she was, thanks to the lunacy of New York’s fusion voting, as exploited by Westchester County Executive Rob Astorino and a loony political activist named Frank Morano.
If the line from Astorino to Morano to Ms. Trump is baffling, so is state election law.
Let’s start with Republican Astorino, who founded the Stop Common Core Party when he unsuccessfully challenged Gov. Cuomo’s reelection in 2014. He did so because fusion voting tallies all the votes received by a candidate on every ballot line, thus giving the candidate an incentive to run on as many lines as possible.
Astorino got more than 50,000 votes on the line, qualifying the Stop Common Core Party as a so-called permanent party that can place candidates on ballots in future contests.
Having a grand total of 377 statewide registered voters — and just 75 in the five boroughs — the organization changed its name to the Reform Party, and Morano forced the city Board of Elections to conduct a half-dozen congressional primaries on June 28, four of them in districts with no other contests. It meant that there were fully staffed poll sites around the city that were open for 15 hours where not a single voter showed up.
Even more absurd, Morano fielded no candidates. He merely gave Reform voters the chance to write in their choices.
They produced one-one tie votes in Rep. Grace Meng’s Queens district, Rep. Hakeem Jeffries’ Brooklyn/Queens district and Rep. Charlie Rangel’s uptown and Bronx district. The ties negated the tally — so actor Tony Danza, who scored a vote, is out of luck.
One voter cast a ballot in Rep. Yvette Clarke’s Brooklyn district for a candidate who declined to accept the nomination. None of the four Reform voters in Rep. Eliot Engel’s Bronx/Westchester district turned out.
The Trump daughter scored two votes in Maloney’s district, enabling her to top three competitors, who each pulled down one. The nomination is hers for the taking.
Morano believes that he has proven something or other about New York’s election system. Actually, he has confirmed only that he is a pest with a talent for wasting taxpayer money.