Kiryas Joel's newly registered Working Families voters had a unique tool
to help them Tuesday: a stamp that printed the name Niki Lee Rowe on
the ballot. Rowe, the wife of county Legislator Michael Amo,
isn't running for county executive, but was chosen [by Satmar rabbis] to
be the not-Donnery candidate. An election inspector confiscated
the stamp and turned it over to David Green, the county's Republican
election commissioner.
The relatively new opportunity-to-ballot petition allows New York State candidates to force primaries for third-party lines and wage write-in campaigns to challenge the endorsed candidates of their parties – and it's wreaking havoc on the election process.
In 2009, only three write-in primaries for third-party lines reportedly took place in Orange, Ulster and Sullivan counties. In 2013 there were reportedly 30 – ten times more.
Arguably, the most prominent example of this phenomenon took place in the Orange county executive race, as the Times Herald-Record reports:
…Democratic candidate Roxanne Donnery had gotten the customary blessing of the Working Families Party to run on its ballot line, but found herself challenged by her adversaries in the [Satmar hasidic] Village of Kiryas Joel, who petitioned for a primary and signed up dozens of new voters in the labor-backed party.
And when the results came in on Tuesday, the write-ins led Donnery, 90-51, with a few election districts plus absentee ballots yet to be counted.…
Kiryas Joel's newly registered Working Families voters had a unique tool to help them Tuesday: a stamp that printed the name Niki Lee Rowe on the ballot.
Rowe, the wife of county Legislator Michael Amo, isn't running for county executive, but was chosen [by Satmar rabbis] to be the not-Donnery candidate.
An election inspector confiscated the stamp and turned it over to David Green, the county's Republican election commissioner. He said Friday that stamping Rowe's name on ballots was legal, although circulating the stamp inside the polling station wasn’t.…
The Times Herald-Record notes f Rowe does win when all the votes are counted, and if she decides to accept the nomination, Donnery and the Republican candidate, Steve Neuhaus, might have grounds to challenge her right to run in the general election
Why?
Election records reportedly show she has been registered to vote in Saratoga County – not Orange County where Kiryas Joel is located – since 2008.
As for KJ's Satmar hasidim, their Brooklyn affiliates were linked to massive vote fraud that allegedly included buying votes and sending waves of underage teens to vote using false names to elect the candidates chosen by their rebbe, Rabbi Aharon Teotelbaum.