RAZOR THIN RAGE
Cabán’s team claims Elex Board shenanigans as Katz leads by 16 votes
Tiffany Cabán (above) is locked in a toe-totoe vote-count battle with Melinda Katz (below).
Tiffany Caban’s campaign accused city election officials of “disenfranchising” voters Friday after getting another six ballots counted in the heated race for Queens district attorney, chipping away at front-runner Melinda Katz’s razor-thin lead.
The ballots — five of which were cast for Caban — shrinks Katz’s lead in the primary election from 20 to 16 votes.
Because of the narrow gulf between the two candidates, a manual recount of the roughly 90,000 votes cast in the June 25 primary will begin Tuesday.
The freshly admitted ballots had initially been thrown out by the Board of Elections because of party affiliation issues, but Caban lawyers pushed for them to be accepted because they said they had been purged without good reason.
Officials sided with Caban, a progressive public defender with a platform of reducing incarceration, and opened the new ballots at the Board of Elections offices in Kew Gardens Friday afternoon.
The criminal justice reformer’s team used the development as fodder for unsubstantiated allegations that the Queens Democratic establishment is trying to suppress votes for Caban to propel Katz, the borough’s president, to victory.
“In recent days, the Board of Elections improperly invalidated affidavit ballots, disenfranchising voters that should have their vote count,” said Monica Klein, a spokeswoman for the Caban campaign.
“Our campaign is working diligently to ensure that the Queens party machine does not disenfranchise or suppress votes that should be considered legitimate. There is too much at stake here, both for our communities that have suffered under a regressive criminal justice system and for the legitimacy of our democratic process. We remain confident that if every valid vote is counted, we will be victorious.”
Lawyers for Caban said they believe another 114 ballots should be counted that were invalidated because voters had failed to list their party affiliation.
The fate of those votes will be decided in Queens Supreme Court, where lawyers for both sides will square off Tuesday.
The DA race was flipped on its head Wednesday night when Katz unexpectedly took the lead by a mere 20 votes after some 6,000 paper ballots were counted.
Caban had at that point al
ready declared herself the winner after she was holding a 1,090-vote lead with 99% of precincts reporting.
The 114 ballots Caban now wants counted is a far cry from the 2,329 votes her supporters claim — without evidence — were being suppressed after Katz took the lead.
Katz campaign adviser Matthew Rey said the 2,329 votes were invalidated because they were “on their face of it not from Democratic, enrolled voters.”
Rey said the shifting narray tive on how many ballots should be counted shows Caban’s campaign is only interested in getting votes for her counted while “stoking conspiracy theories” about an establishment takeover.
“It is the height of irresponsibility for a candidate for district attorney to make outrageous, wrongheaded claims out of thin air,” Rey said. “Our goal at the beginning of this week was to count every valid vote, and our goal remains to count every valid vote.”
Even though g they’ve yp publicly pushed for all votes to be counted, Caban campaign lawyers tried unsuccessfully to challenge some ballots cast for Katz.
That irony wasn’t lost on Rey.
“Earlier this week, the Caban legal team tried to stop votes from being counted in Southeast Queens and lost, and now her supporters are making false claims about Melinda and this process to try to discredit results which aren’t in her favor,” he said. “Queens deserves better, and we expect to maintain our lead throughout the coming weeks as all valid votes are recounted.”
While Caban’s campaign has moved on from pushing for the 2,329 votes to be counted, a crowd of roughly 50 Caban supporters were still demanding they be counted while picketing outside the Board of Elections offices Friday.
“2,300, we want them counted!” the crowd chanted.
Jay Jacobs, the chairman of the New York State Democratic Party, said Caban’s allies are trying to “de-legitimatize the process” and took a shot at the young public defender’s left-wing values.
“This party is not going to become the party of the far left,” Jacobs told the Daily News. “That is a sure prescription for returning Republicans to power in New York State and I’m not going to sit by and let that happen.”
Whoever comes out victorious is near certain to win the general election in November for the top Queens prosecutor post, which was vacated after longtime DA Richard Brown died in May.