The efforts of candidates to break the Democratic Party’s grip on elected office in East Hampton by unifying on an independent ticket they call the EH Fusion Party sputtered this week when most of them neglected to file a timely notice of acceptance, as required by New York State election law when independent nominating petitions are submitted.
The EH Fusion Party, comprising Republican and Independence Party candidates as well as members of a caucus within the Democratic Party calling itself the East Hampton Reform Democrats, filed an independent nominating petition for a ballot line in the Nov. 5 general election on May 28, the deadline for submission. However, said Nick LaLota, a Suffolk County Board of Elections commissioner, most of them did not file a subsequent acceptance notice by Friday’s deadline.
Only Jill Massa and Jeanne Nielsen, both incumbent assessors, filed those notices, Mr. LaLota said. Lisa R. Rana, an incumbent town justice, will be the other candidate to appear with Ms. Massa and Ms. Nielsen on the EH Fusion Party ticket, he said, because candidates for judicial office are not required to submit such notice. Another EH Fusion Party candidate, Simon Kinsella, who is running for town trustee, submitted an acceptance but it was not notarized as required by law, Mr. LaLota said.
David Gruber, a leader of the Reform Democrats and a candidate for supervisor, said yesterday that he only learned of the acceptance requirement after Friday’s deadline. However, he said, all of the EH Fusion Party’s candidates may still have a path to appearing on the independent party’s ballot, pointing to the board of elections’ vacancy committee, which could authorize it. “I believe it’s possible to correct this error by using the provisions of the vacancy committee,” he said. “When there are vacancies caused by declination,” or if a candidate dies or is disqualified, “a three-person vacancy committee is authorized to fill the vacancy.”
“I see no reason why we can’t fill them with the same people,” he said, “because the purpose is to prevent fraud and provide an orderly process on determining who’s on the ballot. It is not intended for purposes of punishing the candidate or denying the franchise to, in this case, more than 1,000 voters who signed a petition. . . . I don’t know why that would be unacceptable, even though it would be unusual to fill a vacancy with the same person.”
Candidates of established political parties do not have to file affirmative, notarized acceptances, Mr. Gruber noted, and he said that requiring it of independent nominations imposes an undue burden. “It’s well understood that these laws are written with the purpose of trying to make it as difficult as possible for anybody other than major-party candidates to run. The major parties try to monopolize the franchise, to rig the system in their own favor. Their rigging of the system is a big part of the reason we have to do this in the first place.”
Cate Rogers, chairwoman of the East Hampton Town Democratic Committee, was quick to criticize the EH Fusion Party candidates, and by extension the Reform Democrats. “The inability of the ‘con-fusion’ group to gain a line on the ballot once again demonstrates their incompetence,” she wrote in an email yesterday. “In their haste to sow division and divide our community for their own benefit, David Gruber, Rona Klopman” — a leader of the Reform Democrats and candidate for trustee — “and their small group of naysayers have created, in their own words, ‘a mess.’ They have no line and they have no party.”
Mr. Gruber took responsibility for the oversight and said that he will do everything possible to correct it. He sought to remind voters, however, that with the exception of Mr. Kinsella, he and all the other EH Fusion Party candidates will appear together on the Independence Party ballot in the Nov. 5 election. “Voters will still have a choice,” he said.