Two failed write-in candidates in the June 21 Village of Kings Point trustee election and a wealthy supporter are requesting the state attorney general order a new election and investigate the previous election, according to an e-mail from their attorney, Great Neck resident Norman Kaplan.
Village of Kings Point officials agreed Wednesday to preserve ballots for one year and allow them to be examined pending a Freedom of Information Law request.
Write-in candidates Mojgan Sasson, and David Schifter, and local businessman Curtis Katz had filed a lawsuit in Nassau County Supreme Court last week, asking that the ballots be preserved.
Village of Kings Point Mayor Michael Kalnick referred comment on the lawsuit to village attorney Stephen Limmer.
“We all want to keep expenses down, but all of this runs up legal fees,” Kalnick said.
Efforts to reach Limmer were unavailing.
The lawsuit alleged illegal electioneering by a trustee, improper disqualification of ballots, that some poll workers incorrectly explained the write-in ballot procedure, and that voters’ constitutional rights were violated by the lack of clear instruction.
“The worst problem with this election process is that by refusing to have clear instructions available for the use of write-in ballots, every person who exercised his/her right to vote by write-in lost the right of secret ballot, a fundamental American right guaranteed to every New Yorker,” according to the lawsuit. “This is because the only two candidates on the machine ballots were incumbent Trustees and anyone who had any question about write-in ballots was immediately publicly identified as voting for the opposition.”
Despite a controversial 9.8 percent tax increase, incumbent trustees Pete Aaron and Ron Horowitz ran unopposed until Sasson and Schifter mounted a last minute write-in campaign. Both said they were prompted to run by the tax increase.
Katz papered the village with anti-incumbent material. He had previously been critical of trustees for suing to stop Chabad of Great Neck from demolishing a local house to build a temple and school.
The election drew hundreds of Kings Point residents to village hall, which stayed open late to accommodate the crowd. Many were unsure how to vote for a write-in candidate, which resulted in 130 disqualified ballots due to spelling errors and more than one name in the same box.
A total of 452 votes were cast. The final count was Aaron 222, Horowitz 226, Sasson 58, Schifter 29.
Sasson’s name was written on the ballot’s 183 times, according to the lawsuit.
Poll workers said on election night if every vote had qualified the most votes a write-in candidate could have received was 217.
The lawsuit included affidavits from several Kings Point residents who voted in the election, including Catherine Romano, who said her ballot did not count because she voted incorrectly after being misinformed by a poll worker.
“I was specifically told that there was a big box in the upper left hand corner of the ballot form in the conventional voting machines and that I could write their names in that box,” according to the affidavit. “There was an instruction sheet distributed which was of absolutely no help as it did not accurately reflect where the write in boxes were.”
When voters asked poll workers how to vote for write-in candidates, the Great Neck News heard poll workers instruct them to write in the box, not write one name in each box.
