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Most people thought it was a joke, or a prank, when a 22-year-old college student from Queens announced that he was going to run for the New York State Assembly seat, soon to be vacated, in his district. Because really, what normal 22-year-old has the resources, let alone the interest and the stamina and the wherewithal, to come from nowhere and engage in the New York political machine? Has he not heard of city and state legislative dysfunction? Or Shelly Silver? What kind of kid really wants to deal with that?
“I’m a realist,” says Justin Wax Jacobs, that would-be candidate. “I understood my chances of getting nominated were slim. But I still thought I’d give it a shot.”
Jacobs had just graduated in May from SUNY Albany, where he majored in history and poli-sci. He’s been a political junkie since the second grade, when he learned how to tally electoral college votes in the 1996 presidential election. He served in student government, met his assemblywoman, Nettie Mayersohn, when he was 12, and found a high school class trip to Albany electrifying. He hadn’t planned to run for office so early, but here was a real opportunity.
So he contacted a party leader in the 9th District, made famous by Anthony Weiner, a man named Morty Povman. Jacobs wanted to see what it would take to become the Democratic nominee; since this is a special election, there’s no primary. Instead, a four-person committee selects the party’s candidate.
It took him awhile to reach Povman.
“I requested an interview with him, and I was denied,” Jacobs says. He kept at it until he finally got Povman on the phone, at which point, “he told me the nomination was the next day, and then he said, direct quote: ‘Mr. [Michael] Simanowitz is entitled to the position.’ ” He would be the Democratic candidate.
Simanowitz had served on the assemblywoman’s staff for about a decade. The assemblywoman herself was the same one Jacobs had met as a child — Mayersohn held her seat for 28 years and had finally decided to retire at age 85. Among the people who sat on the four-person panel to determine the party nominee were Simanowitz, Mayersohn and Povman, now 80 and himself a former City Council member (1971-2001; never faced a primary challenger).
Povman admits that he used the word “entitled” when defending Simanowitz’s candidacy. “That is my opinion, yes,” Povman says. “He was with her for many years and worked very closely with Nettie and, um . . . I’m drawing a blank on his name now.”
Michael?
“Michael. This guy is going to win because he has the necessary experience.”
Perhaps. But what Simanowitz really has is the support of the party machine, its full armor and apparatus brought to bear against all comers, and that’s really the only thing he needs. (Simanowitz declined to comment for this article.)
Jacobs, undeterred, decided to run as an independent and began navigating his way through the thicket of rules, laws and documents found on the Board of Elections website in order to file as a candidate.
According to the BoE’s directives, Jacobs had seven days to collect 1,500 signatures, all of which had to be witnessed, and those petitions had to be formatted in a very specific way, as did his filing with the BoE — all of which he says he did. “I looked over the independent nominating rules, the Board of Election and New York election laws,” he says. “We copied everything verbatim as specified.”
Sample instruction on this 18-page document:
“An amended cover sheet must clearly identify the original cover sheet, which it is amending, or attach a copy of the original cover sheet, which it is amending. The amended cover sheet must contain all the information required of a cover sheet. Amended cover sheets must contain the following authentication: ‘This is to certify that I am authorized to file this amended cover sheet.’ ”
On his cover letter, Jacobs wrote his name, the office he was seeking and his address. He did not name the specific district in which he was running. “Nowhere does it say the specific district needs to be included,” Jacobs says. Indeed, it does not, and that omission was fatal.
The BoE denied Jacobs the right to run.
“Every employee at the Board of Elections, top to bottom, is a political appointee,” says Paul Newell, who had his own run-in with the face of the machine, Shelly Silver, in 2008. “They’re the only city agency not subject to civil service law. You are employed there at the behest of a county leader; the board tries to keep incumbents on the ballot.”
Jacobs later learned that the requirement he missed was an obscure rule only an attorney specializing in election law would know about. In other words, Jacobs had been expected to know something he had no way of knowing, and though most in politics find him naive, he says being felled this way didn’t shock or outrage him at all.
“I was disappointed, but not surprised,” he says. “I’m 22, with no political party machine backing. I wasn’t expecting a miracle. I was hoping for one, but I didn’t expect one.”
Whether Jacobs’ torpedoed candidacy is his fault or the result of a booby-trapped system whose infrastructure dates back to Tammany Hall — that depends whom you ask.
“This sounds like he made some really stupid mistake,” says former state Sen. Martin Connor (1978-2008). “It’s a lot easier for people to get on the ballot than it was 25 years ago. I have clients with a ninth-grade education who’ve gotten it done. They always have some crybaby story.”
“If you’re an outsider, like Jacobs, you ask around,” says Jerry Skurnik, longtime partner in the political consulting firm Prime New York. “What I learned about Jacobs is that he didn’t use the correct terminology.”
What does that mean?
“I don’t know what that is. It could be a district number or a title of a job.”
So you, a professional and an expert, don’t even know?
“Exactly,” Skurnik says. “If you just read the rules posted on the website, it can still trip you up.”
Skurnik does agree with Povman that the rules have loosened up — he recalls the days when insurgents would be denied the right to run for using the wrong color ink — but he still thinks they’re a disgrace. Despite the Board of Elections protests to the contrary — “We just administer the law,” says NYC president J.C. Polanco — Skurnik says the BoE can be capricious when deciding which candidates will be denied the right to run for violating some super-concealed, hyper-technical rule.
“New York has the most complicated and convoluted election laws,” Skurnik says. “I’m not even sure where the rules come in and the laws come in.” He does, however, advise that future party challengers avail themselves of a company called Content Critical, which is based in New Jersey and specializes in printing New York City petitions. “And hire a lawyer.”
What happened to Jacobs is commonly called “ballot-bumping,” and this dark art’s highest practitioner is, of course, state Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver (in office since 1977; speaker since 1994).
“I out-raised Shelly Silver in one cycle,” says aspiring Democratic office-holder Newell, who attempted his Sisyphean challenge in 2008. For daring that, Silver launched a carpet-bombing campaign against Newell, then 34, in his Lower East Side district.
Even three years later, Newell — now running as a district leader — remains skittish about detailing specifics of Silver’s assault, preferring to speak in generalities: “You can call the administration of a senior center and remind them about state grants they may or may not have coming,” Newell says. “Getting to the tenant association president in public housing is a classic — you give $500 for the annual barbecue and say, ‘If this guy shows up here, turn him around.’ I could usually do three or four floors in the Grand Street buildings before getting kicked out. They go through your donor list and if they have anything on someone, they use it. People who indicate support for you get reached out to.”
But Silver is so powerful and popular among his constituents — why bother?
“It’s a good question,” Newell says. “They’re very risk-averse. I’m out there telling people how our state is broken. They don’t need that. They’re looking to make sure their power is secure.”
Last July, Silver filed suit against Joan Lipp, a 62-year-old political neophyte who’d been asked by the Republican Party to serve as a placeholder until they could find a suitable challenger. “I never even got to that point,” Lipp says. “I got two stacks of court papers hand-delivered to me. They said if I go ahead — I got threatened. He was suing the Board of Elections as well.”
Lipp, who couldn’t afford an attorney, recused herself. The case got dropped, and the speaker ran unopposed. (Silver declined to comment for this article.)
So: What’s the answer? Common sense dictates that the simplest solution would be a re-drafting and simplification of the laws and rules — maybe even go crazy and conflate the rules into the laws — followed by a transparent posting on one website. That way, insurgent candidates who lack financial and political resources could make a fair run at any given seat.
Meanwhile, officials like former Mayor Ed Koch are advocating an independent commission to redistrict in the wake of the 2010 Census — which could help make elections more competitive.
But instead, Republicans and Democrats will gerrymand the system once again; each party has to give up one Congressional seat, and they’ll each have the luxury of picking which one.
The problem, of course, is that any fair change to elections would require the very people who draft and pass legislation to be the architects of their own potential ouster.
“This is the inside-est of inside baseball,” says Russ Haven, legislative counsel at the New York Public Interest Research Group. “It’s so outside the understanding of the average New Yorker that it’s hard to get them riled up. The Founding Fathers would be horrified by New York election law.”
The best hope lies with Gov. Cuomo. “He’s publicly committed to doing campaign finance reform next year,” Haven says. “Ballot reform could be part of that. In the meantime, complain loudly and often.”
As for Jacobs, he says he will run again someday. “This has actually heartened my resolve,” he says. “The whole process is a hindrance of democracy. I campaigned on the idea that we need ethics reform in the entire election system, and I think this has proven my point.”