ALBANY – The State Board of Elections has rejected Democratic 42nd District State Senate candidate Pramilla Malick’s effort to bypass the primary election by creating a “Stop Corruption Party” line on the general election ballot.
Malick and Jennifer Metzger will face off on Thursday for the Democratic line.
The state board found that Malick’s petitions for the independent party contained 1,193 invalid signatures including 743 people who did not live in the district or were not registered to vote.
To bypass a primary election in the district, candidates must collect signatures from at least 3,000 registered voters of the 190,000 in the district. Malick’s contained 2,149 valid signatures.
“We decided to file an objection when it became clear that signatures of people not registered to vote in our district were being submitted to meet the minimum legal requirement,” said Kelleigh McKenzie, Metzger’s campaign manager.
Malick responded to her petitions being nvalidated. “Knowing petition
rules are hard enough even if you are a seasoned party petitioner, but
our volunteers were all first timers who had never done this before. Voters
move, sometimes get purged, or often have different mailing addresses.
These are very common errors. The bottom line is that nearly 3500 individuals
who do live in the district desire to have an independent Stop Corruption
Party line, and rather than expanding access to democracy my opponent
is obstructing it, just as she did with our Reform Party petitions, This
is scraping the bottom of the barrel I suspect to deflect from issues
raised during the debate about her campaign finance irregularities and
conflicts of interests with NYSERDA grants.
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