4 JULY 11, 2019 RIDGEWOOD TIMES WWW.QNS.COM
Recount starts in tight Queens DA race
BY MARK HALLUM
MHALLUM@SCHNEPSMEDIA.COM
@RIDGEWOODTIMES
The automatic recount in the
Democratic primary for Queens
district attorney is finally
underway, as Board of Elections
workers began the tedious process at
about 10:15 a.m. on July 9 at their Middle
Village facility.
The two top vote-getters in the
election – Borough President
Melinda Katz and public defender
Tiffany Cabán – are separated by
just 16 votes, with Katz having taken
the lead following last week’s count
of paper ballots. She had overcome a
1,100-vote deficit following the June
25 primary vote.
The city Board of Elections
expects the full manual recount in
Middle Village of over 93,000 ballots
to take two to three weeks, with the
first day alone being spent simply
sorting ballot boxes from reading
machines into separate zones. It may
take up to 3 weeks to complete.
About 50 people are at work
overseeing and executing the
meticulous process.
Shortly before the recount
began that morning, lawyers for
the Katz and Cabán campaigns
were in Queens Supreme Court in
Jamaica for a hearing on Cabán’s
lawsuit seeking to have 114 affidavit
ballots counted. A judge adjourned
the case until after the recount,
determining that a decision
shouldn’t be made until there is an
authoritative count.
The recount is expected to take into
account absentee ballots, affidavits
that have been verified, ballots that
were read properly by the scanner
and those that were improperly
filled out but make the voter’s
The recount got underway in Middle Village on July 9.
intention clear.
With ballots being similar to
Scantron sheets, if a voter does
completely fill in the bubble and
instead checks or puts an X next
to their choice, their vote was not
taken into account on June 25.
Cabán’s team filed a lawsuit
against the BOE preemptive to the
count of absentee ballots on July 3
claiming up to 2,500 affidavits had
been unlawfully nixed.
The lawsuit aims to redeem 114
of the affidavits, and Cabán’s camp
believes they will gain anywhere
between 300 and 400 votes from the
manual recount.
The votes have been split between
seven candidates, with Cabán
finishing the primary with 39 percent
of the vote to Katz’s 38 percent.
Many voters submitted ballots for
Councilman Rory Lancman despite
him dropping out of the race and
backing Katz four days before
the primary.
With only about 11 percent of
voters turning out, other ballots
were cast for Gregory Lasak, Mina
Malik, Jose Nieves and Betty Lugo.
Katz & Cabán camps reach the boiling point
BY ROBERT POZARYCKI
RPOZARYCKI@RIDGEWOODTIMES.COM
@ROBBPOZ
As a mandatory recount
loomed in the too-close-tocall
Democratic primary for
Queens district attorney, tensions
between the campaigns of Queens
Borough President Melinda Katz
and public defender Tiff any Cabán
reached the boiling point during the
July 4 holiday weekend.
In less than two weeks, the two
top vote-getters in the primary have
each claimed victory — Cabán after
she built a 1,100-vote lead following
the June 25 primary, and Katz after
overcoming that deficit and taking
a 20-vote lead following the July
3 paper ballot count. (Katz’s lead
shrunk on July 5 to just 16 after
the Board of Elections unsealed six
affidavit ballots deemed valid. Five
of them were for Cabán, the other
for Katz).
Now the two campaigns are
trading vicious barbs with one
another over the process itself. In
statements sent to QNS on July 4
and 5, Cabán’s camp claimed that
the recount process was tainted by
insider “machine” politics, while
Katz’s team countered that her
main opponent deliberately sought
to exclude votes from communities
of color.
A Cabán spokesperson charged
insinuated that the campaign “is
up against a party machine that has
ruled local politics and suppressed
democracy for decades.” Bill Lipton,
director of the Working Families
Party, which supports Cabán,
further insinuated that the machine
“handpicked” Board of Elections
workers who dismissed first-time
voters, many of whom likely chose
the public defender.
“Thousands of affidavit ballots,
many of them cast by new voters
inspired by Tiffany’s message of a
criminal justice system that works
for all of us, were invalidated by
poll workers handpicked by Queens
party leaders,” Lipton said. “At the
same time, when we go to court,
we’ll face judges handpicked by the
same machine. The system is rife
with conflicts of interest.”
The Caban campaign is also
fundraising off allegations of
impropriety. In an email received
by QNS, the campaign sought $10
donations from the public in order
to have “the resources we need to
make sure that this recount is fair
and transparent.” The email claimed
that the Board of Elections “is trying
to throw out over 2,000 votes.”
But Matthew Rey, a partner at Red
Horse Strategies and spokesperson
for the Katz campaign, dismissed
the allegations as “outrageous”
and “wrongheaded claims.” He
then charged that earlier in the
week, “the Cabán 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.”
“Our goal at the beginning of
this week was to count every valid
vote, and our goal remains to count
every valid vote,” Rey said. “Our
values were consistent when we
were behind, and now that we
have the lead, remain the same. We
don’t cherry-pick voters, and we
certainly don’t exclude voters from
communities of color, as others have
tried to do.”
The recount, automatically
triggered by law because the
winning margin is less than half of
1 percent, began on Tuesday, July
9, in Middle Village. The Board of
Elections must count by hand more
than 90,000 ballots, including
scanned ballots from Primary Day,
absentee ballots and permitted
affidavit ballots.
Congressman Gregory Meeks denounced the heated rhetoric in the tooclose
to-call Queens DA primary. Photo: Max Parrott/QNS
Photo: Mark Hallum/QNS
/WWW.QNS.COM
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