Lt. Gov. Benjamin's arrest exposes huge flaw in N.Y. election law - Yahoo News

On Tuesday, New York Lt. Gov. Brian Benjamin resigned from his post after being indicted by the Department of Justice for allegedly conspiring to funnel illegal contributions to his failed 2021 bid for New York City comptroller.

You might assume, with the general election still almost seven months away, that this means there is no chance Benjamin — who is not campaigning for lieutenant governor — would be on the ballot this fall, much less emerge victorious. But you would be wrong.

Thanks to quirks of New York state law, removing Benjamin from the ballot for New York’s June 28 primary is extremely difficult.

Gov. Kathy Hochul, who was Andrew Cuomo’s lieutenant governor before he resigned amid scandal, is running for reelection independently of Benjamin in what is likely to be a low-turnout primary where many voters may not know or care about his arrest. But New York fuses the two nominees into a single general election ticket.

New York is a strongly Democratic state, so it’s conceivable that Benjamin could win an election that neither he nor his party wants him to have anything to do with.

“Thanks to New York’s rather archaic election laws, it’s difficult to get off the ballot once you have made it on — even if you don’t want to run anymore,” City & State NY, a magazine covering local politics, explained. “Generally speaking, the only way to get off the ballot is if someone dies, they move out of state or they get nominated for another position.”

Under New York law, once you qualify for the ballot — in this case, the ballot for the Democratic primary — you have only four days to decline to appear on it. The state party designated Hochul and Benjamin as its gubernatorial ticket at the state party convention in February, meaning the window for Benjamin to decline has passed.

“It’s too late,” Henry Berger, a New York election lawyer, told Yahoo News. “Once you're designated for the ballot, you have a limited right to get off the ballot. But once that passes, the ballot is set.”

, a New York City news website, “There is already talk of asking Benjamin to resettle in Georgia or Virginia to get him off the ballot.” It sounds simple, but his felony corruption charges make that task much less feasible.

For nonlawyers, there are other alternatives. In 2018, the Working Families Party nominated actress Cynthia Nixon, who was challenging then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo from the left in the Democratic primary. When Cuomo won renomination, Nixon against him in the general election and the WFP switched Nixon to be its nominee for a state Assembly seat.

This isn’t the first time New York has been stuck with an accused criminal on the ballot. In 1988, Rep. Mario Biaggi was convicted of accepting an illegal gratuity and obstruction of justice. Facing pressure from his House colleagues, he resigned from office and attempted to get himself removed from the ballots in the upcoming Democratic and Republican primaries (he was running in both, which is legal in New York). The Board of Elections, however, refused to remove him. He lose the Democratic primary to future Rep. Elliot Engel, but to win the GOP nomination, despite not campaigning for it. He lost the general election to Engel.

Hochul could encourage her supporters to back Reyna or Archila in the primary, or one of them to serve out the rest of Benjamin’s term. But, in a sign that neither of them is planning to cozy up to Hochul, both Reyna and Archila the governor on Tuesday for failing to properly vet Benjamin before appointing him last year.

But New York primary voters have split their tickets before. In 1982, Mario Cuomo won the Democratic nomination for governor, but , who ran with gubernatorial candidate and then-New York City Mayor Ed Koch, won the lieutenant governor nomination. The unlikely duo were then bound together as the party’s ticket that November, and they went on to win.

Hochul herself was almost upset by Williams in the 2018 lieutenant governor primary. While Andrew Cuomo beat Nixon by a 32-point margin, Hochul only beat Williams, who was Nixon’s running mate, . That indirectly set up Benjamin’s eventual appointment, as it showed that Hochul — a moderate Democrat from the suburbs of Buffalo — had to make inroads among Black voters and progressives in her next statewide run.

One last theoretical alternative is that the state Legislature could pass a new law disqualifying Benjamin from the ballot. On Wednesday evening, City & State’s Zach Williams Assembly Member Amy Paulin, a Democrat, is writing a bill that would allow Benjamin to be replaced, but it is not yet clear how. Williams noted that any new such law is likely to face litigation from those who would prefer to see the Hochul ticket suffer, such as her primary opponents or her potential Republican adversaries this fall such as Rep. Lee Zeldin.

source: https://news.yahoo.com/lt-gov-benjamins-arrest-exposes-huge-flaw-in-ny-election-law-160229469.html

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