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The ballot for a special City Council election in Queens featuring the fiancée of police-shooting victim Sean Bell was redesigned in a way that could leave voters thinking one of her Democratic rivals was on the same ticket as Republican Carl Paladino, The Post has learned.
Supporters of Ruben Wills were in an uproar when they learned that his name would appear in the second row on the ballot in the same column as Republican candidates, instead of in the first column held by the Democrats, led by Andrew Cuomo.
Bell’s fiancée, Nicole Paultre-Bell, whose name was appearing in the same column as the Independence Party hopefuls, would have likely been the biggest beneficiary of Wills’ placement in the GOP column.
Bell was killed in a hail of police bullets in Jamaica during an encounter with cops after his bachelor party on Nov. 26, 2006, the day he and Nicole were to have wed. The tragedy prompted her to get involved in politics.
The council race on Nov. 2 is nonpartisan, meaning Paultre-Bell and the other six candidates are running under the banners of their own independent parties.
There’s about an inch of white space on the paper ballot separating the general election contests from the council race.
But, as one insider explained, “Some voters are going to look from the top down and think Wills is a Republican.”
In the heavily-minority and Democratic 28th district, that’s a political death warrant.
To place Wills in the second column under the Republican names, city Board of Elections Executive Director George Gonzalez had to leave the first column blank — something that has never been done before.
In fact, the board’s commissioners voted a couple of weeks ago specifically to place Wills in Column 1 — under the Dems — rejecting alternatives offered by Stanley Schlein, Paultre-Bell’s lawyer.
Wills won that ballot position by being the first to hand in his petitions.
Schlein is a well-known election lawyer with close ties to Gonzalez, leading some critics to claim that Gonzalez made the unauthorized change at Schlein’s request.
Both men flatly denied that to be the case.
“Everything I do is on-the-record, publicly,” Schlein declared.
Gonzalez — who took the top spot at the elections board just two months ago — said he acted on his own with no prompting from anyone.
“It was a bad judgmental call on my part,” he said.
The ballot will be revised to move Wills over to the Democratic column, Gonzalez said.