Gov. Andrew Cuomo. Photo courtesy of Wiki Commons.

State Senate

Gov. Andrew Cuomo says he’ll back both Democrats and Republicans on a case-by-case basis.

Manhattan

Rep. Charlie Rangel re-affirmed his support for Guillermo Linares’ Senate bid.

Julie Menin has already maxed out on fundraising for the Manhattan BP race.

Brooklyn

Simcha Felder is in talks with a top GOP operative about managing Felder’s campaign – perhaps indicating the Senate GOP is behind his candidacy.

Opponent David Storobin continued to hit golf balls during a Jewish prayer at a recent charity outing.

Andrew Gounardes’ Senate campaign keeps hammering away on the Marty Golden/Feminine Presence story.

Elsewhere

Sean Patrick Maloney announced his campaign team against Nan Hayworth.

Cuomo’s next big push will be for campaign finance reform.

The New York City Board of Elections is chafing at criticism, but nonetheless is seeking improvements.

Mayor Bloomberg mocked the Board of Elections (again.)

To read more from City & State click here.

Via the Daily News.

A source at the New York City Board of Elections tells us that none other than John Haggerty showed up this afternoon on behalf of Republican Queens Councilman Eric Ulrich’s Senate campaign.

According to the source, Haggerty, donning a baseball cap as he entered the BOE, showed up to submit petition signatures — though Ulrich’s campaign said that Haggerty was actually there to access the BOE’s Candidate Records Unit, while a campaign staffer named Mike Michel formally submitted petitions. Yet our BOE source also says only Haggerty signed in at the Board’s front desk.

Haggerty was convicted last December of stealing $750,000 in campaign funds from New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. He is currently appealing the verdict, but faces up to four years in prison if he is unsuccessful.

Ulrich’s Senate campaign spokeswoman brushed off the fact that a convicted felon was seen taking a public role in the councilman’s campaign.

“We are really happy with our petitioning response,” said Ulrich spokeswoman Jessica Proud. “Council Member Ulrich turned in nearly 3,000 signatures from every corner of the senate district today.  That’s what counts.”

John Haggerty has long been a political ally of Ulrich, whose former chief of staff is Haggerty’s brother, Bart. The two brothers have unsuccessfully sought to overthrown Queens Republican Party chairman Phil Ragusa.

Well-known for his election law skills,  Haggerty has also long been a fixture during Board of Elections proceedings.

Ulrich is running in a Republican Senate primary in eastern Queens against attorney Juan Reyes, who has the support of the Queens Republican Party. Ulrich, who is the favorite in the GOP primary and has the backing of the Senate Republicans, would face Democratic State Sen. Joe Addabbo in November.

Update: An adviser to Ulrich’s campaign wrote in to note that Michel may not have signed in at the Board of Elections because, “You don’t need to sign in to submit petitions. You just need to clock them in at the desk. You need to sign in to go inside.”

To read more from City & State click here.

Adriano Espaillat is reportedly preparing to conceded to Charlie Rangel and will run instead for state Senate re-election.

Certification of Rangel’s win will likely come on Tuesday.

Brooklyn

Marty Golden was called a “sexist pig” on CNN for wanting to hold his now-cancelled feminine etiquette event.

Brooklyn DA Charles Hynes has a primary opponent.

MoveOn.org really, really regrets going after Charles Barron during his congressional primary.

2013 Mayoral Race

The various candidates are using social media, but are wary of repeating Rep. Anthony Weiner’s Twitter incident.

U.S. Senate

Kirsten Gillibrand told reporters that her values are fundamentally different from those of Wendy Long.

To read more from City & State click here.

Commissioner Frederic Umane.

It’s been more than a year and a half since the New York City Board of Elections voted to oust its executive director George Gonzalez, after the BOE came under fire for a mangled primary election in Sept. 2010. But the board has never replaced Gonzalez, and commissioners said they simply had not found a qualified replacement.

A ballot in Russian. Photo courtesy of Wiki Commons.

At a Board of Elections Commissioners’ Meeting Tuesday that was overshadowed by the Rangel/Espaillat congressional primary, commissioners couldn’t decide whether or not to support a costly bill passed by the state Legislature this session that requires ballots to be printed in Russian.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s counsel had written to the BOE seeking its advice and recommendations on whether or not the governor should sign the bill, but BOE counsel Steve Richman said that implementing it would be enormously expensive.

Implementing it would cost the city “$600,000 to $700,000 per election,” Richman said, for the more than 2,700 interpreters that would be needed to staff polling sites, and an additional $6 million per election for ballots.

The bill requiring the Russian language ballots was “written in a poor an unclear manner” that made it difficult to interpret, Richman said.

The cost projections seemed to alarm the commissioners, who said they would like Richman to write back to the Cuomo with their cost findings, without a recommendation on what the governor should do.

A bill requiring translation of voting materials into Russian was passed in 2009, and a stronger bill was passed this year because the earlier bill was never implemented.

All of which has displeased Assemblyman Steven Cymbrowitz, who co-sponsored this year’s bill with State Sen. David Storobin. Cymbrowitz drafted a release calling for Richman to resign.

“Mr. Richman’s action comes after years of inaction,” the release says.

“The Board of Elections has refused to abide by a 2009 law, which I fought for, requiring that voting materials be translated into Russian. As the Board’s top legal official, he is responsible for his agency’s failure to abide by the law,” Cymbrowitz said.

To read the full article at City & State click here.

“One of the things we’ve pushed for at the BOE is to figure out a brand new way of closing these procedures to minimize the potential error that could arise,” said Commissioner J.C. Polanco at a BOE Commissioners’ meeting Tuesday afternoon.

“Unfortunately, the legislature didn’t move on any of those concerns,” he said.

The Board has been widely criticized for its handling of this primary and past elections, and State Sen. Adriano Espaillat is using vote-count errors and other reported “irregularities” from primary night as grounds for a legal challenge to the primary results, which his attorney Martin Connor filed in New York State Supreme Court today. A group called LatinoJustice is also asking the Department of Justice to investigate the Board of Elections’ handling of the primary.

Polanco deflected criticism that BOE was to blame for any of the reported problems, including stories of a shortage of bilingual poll-workers and voters turned away from polling sites, in addition to the uncounted ballots.

“What you saw that night was reporting done by the AP from numbers given to them by the NYPD,” Polanco said, adding that the NYPD was “not at all” to blame for what happened.

Polanco said the BOE was being unfairly maligned by the campaigns.

“I think its unfortunate. What’s happening is the campaigns are launching incredible vicious attacks to the hardworking men and women here at the board of elections,  and they’re based on absolutely nothing but a conspiracy theory,” he said.

“The reality is we have hardworking men and women here at the Board of Elections that are working tirelessly to make sure that each one of these ballots are counted,” he said.

Common Cause executive director Susan Lerner said the primary SNAFUs were “ par for the course.”

“This is an election where we only had a few primaries. Imagine how much worse this is going to be in September,” she said.

To read the full article at City & State click here.

Reporters swarm Espaillat campaign spokesman Ibrahim Khan outside Manhattan Supreme Court

At a hearing in State Supreme Court in lower Manhattan today, State Sen. Adriano Espaillat’s counsel Martin Connor announced the campaign’s intention to file a petition that could potentially pave the way for a do-over of last week’s Congressional primary election.

Espaillat lost to Rep. Charlie Rangel by what was initially reported as several thousand votes, but Rangel’s margin of victory is now about 2 percent, or 802 votes. The Espaillat campaign is hoping that voter complaints about irregularities at polling places and the existence of roughly 2,000 uncounted affidavit ballots could reverse the election’s outcome.

On Friday, Connor filed a petition against Rangel, the New York Police Department and the City Board of Elections asking the Court to watch over the counting of outstanding votes, a process that is not scheduled to begin until Thursday.

The new petition, which the campaign intends to file tomorrow, will include another statute covering “irregularities” in the primary process. If a judge does find evidence of irregularities, it could give Espaillat grounds to ask for a new primary election, said campaign spokesman Ibrahim Khan.

“The petition allows you to file for the election to be redone,” Khan said. “Today was about preserving all of our legal options.”

Initial reports from the BOE on primary night showed Rangel winning the race by roughly 2,000 votes out of more than 40,000 cast, but by last week’s end, an error that left votes from 79 of the 506 district precincts unaccounted for lowered the Board’s accounting of Rangel’s victory margin to 800 votes.

Rangel campaign manager Moises Perez would not comment on the reports of problems from primary night, including voters’ complaints about a lack of available bilingual poll-workers to help Spanish speaking voters.

To read the full article at City & State click here.