Amy Bernstein, a Brooklyn traffic court judge, was walking home from work one night in late April when a young man with a clipboard approached her on a subway platform and asked her to file a petition to support the placement of independents. He said he asked if he could sign it. Voting in New York.
Bernstein said the top of the petition was folded underneath, so the candidate’s name was not visible. She asked for more details and she told the man that she was the judge. At that point, the man reportedly pulled away the clipboard and asked, “Am I going to get in trouble?”
The petition is for Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s independent presidential campaign, which is working to collect the signatures needed to secure a spot on New York’s November ballot. We need 45,000 people for this campaign, but we’re aiming for more than 100,000. Candidates often collect more signatures than necessary in case some become invalid for various reasons.
“At the very least, it’s misleading,” Bernstein said of the exchange. “I was really surprised.”
More than half a dozen New York City residents, including two randomly contacted New York Times reporters, have testified to similar encounters with Mr. Kennedy’s signature activists in Brooklyn over the past three weeks. In each case, residents were approached by petitioners with clipboards and asked to support “independent” or “progressive” candidates, and in one case to work together to get Democrats and President Biden on the ballot. I was asked to do so.
In three cases, petitioners alleged they were being paid for work, the people approached said. In four cases, the appellants said they were instructed by supervisors not to show or mention Mr. Kennedy’s name. Petitioner’s description and photos suggest they are at least four different people of his. The petitioners themselves could not be identified and could not be reached for comment.
In each encounter reported by the Times, the names of Mr. Kennedy and his running mate, Nicole Shanahan, were hidden by folded pieces of paper. Only the list of electors (the lesser-known people nominated to vote for candidates in the Electoral College) was displayed in fine print at the top.
Most of the New Yorkers interviewed by the Times have a background in law or politics, and two have worked in Democratic politics. They all said they were curious about their encounter and posted about it on social media or contacted reporters. In two cases, they reported the issue to state authorities.
Campaign manager Amaryllis Fox Kennedy, who is also Kennedy’s daughter-in-law, said the actions were “completely contrary to all of our intensive training and materials.” She said the campaign will take legal action against paid contractors found to be involved in such activities.
Kennedy said the campaign has many paid contractors in New York, who tend to hire local crews and “often hire other people themselves.” He said the petitions collected by his campaign would be examined “for any signs of paper folding,” and said campaign staff responsible for routine fraud checks had seen no signs of such activity. He added that there was not.
“We take ballot access, voter rights and authenticity extremely seriously,” Kennedy said. “That is the very essence of what motivated us to fight the establishment in the first place.”
Slippery or misleading tactics are nothing new in the world of signature gathering to gain access to the ballot for political candidates. Campaign efforts often outsource the time-consuming and expensive work of stopping people on the streets to outside companies, which employ temporary workers. Mr. Kennedy will need to gather hundreds of thousands of signatures across the country as he races to get Mr. Kennedy on the ballot in all 50 states, relying on a vast network of volunteers, contractors, consultants and lawyers. be.
While some of the encounters described in the Times are misleading but considered legitimate, others could fall under the category of election fraud, or at least be used as fodder for a court challenge. Legal experts said there is a possibility that
James A. Gardner, a professor at the University at Buffalo School of Law, said folding a petition to hide a candidate’s name likely constitutes fraud. “This is one of those strange cases where the law and common sense coincide,” Gardner said.
Gardner said the primary purpose of collecting signatures is to show that the state’s base of eligible voters wants to vote for the candidate. “There is case law in New York state that invalidates a petition if the purpose of the petition is misrepresented.”
He pointed to a 1959 court decision stemming from the Queens case. A judge ruled that residents were fraudulently induced to sign petitions supporting candidates for local government office. And people were told they were signing up for school bus and tax proposals. A judge ruled that the candidate could not be placed on the ballot.
But Jeffrey M. Weiss, a professor at New York Law School who specializes in elections and voting rights, asked whether state law specifically prohibits misleading petitions, or whether folding the sheet would be considered an illegal alteration. He said he did not know.
“This depends on whether Kennedy’s petition is challenged in the future,” Weiss said. “If so, this could attract the attention of the court.”
Mr. Kennedy, a 70-year-old environmental lawyer who has become a prominent vaccine skeptic and conspiracy theorist in recent years, is already on the ballot in California, Delaware, Hawaii, Utah and the battleground state of Michigan. His campaign says it has also collected enough signatures in Idaho, Iowa, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina and Ohio. Biden’s Democratic allies are running a fierce campaign to block Kennedy from the state’s ballot, and a legal challenge is almost certain.
New York has become one of the least favorable states for independent and third-party candidates since 2020, when a law was passed that drastically limited political parties’ access to automated ballots and created strict rules for collecting signatures. It is one. It takes the independent candidate just six weeks to collect her 45,000 verified signatures. Across the country, this process has long been riddled with misleading tactics, mistakes and fraud. In 2022, several Republican candidates in Michigan’s gubernatorial race were removed from the ballot due to forged signatures collected by an outside petition company.
The Kennedy campaign has hundreds of volunteers collecting signatures across New York state. Training documents for these volunteers, seen by the Times, include clear instructions on how to gather petition signatures, beginning with “do not misrepresent yourself or the petition in any way.”
Volunteer efforts are supplemented by paid signature collectors.
Jeffrey Norquist, a sociology professor at Farmingdale State University, signs the petition after being accosted on the platform of the Atlantic Avenue Barclays Center subway station, a major transit hub in a busy area of Brooklyn. He said he was asked if he would do so. To allow third party candidates to participate in voting.
“I’m usually not good at this kind of thing,” Dr. Norquist said. However, he noticed that the top of the page had collapsed so that the candidates were no longer visible and asked why. The man says this is a petition to Mr. Kennedy, and Dr. Norquist leaves.
Two days later, he saw a man on the same platform — “a basic white guy in his late 20s,” though he couldn’t say if it was the same one — and Dr. Norquist asked him why people I asked him if he was “cheating”. It didn’t matter, the man said, because Biden was going to win in New York anyway. He just wants to make a few bucks, he said.
Joel S. Berg, head of a hunger and food security nonprofit, was out for a run on a Saturday in late April when he saw a man holding a clipboard with a petition. Berg, a veteran of Democratic politics and petition work, paused. She recalled the man saying he was trying to help “Joe Biden and other Democrats” and tweeting, “And Kennedy, too.”
Berg said he asked the man if he was a paid recruiter and the man said yes. “I didn’t want to bust his chops,” Berg said. “But if a campaign I liked had done something deceptive, I would have been pissed.”
Attorney Ira Perlstein said she was accosted twice on the sidewalk near Barclays Center, directly above the Atlantic Avenue subway station in Brooklyn. He said the first time the man told him the petition was for “any candidate” to be on the ballot, but when Pearlstein unfolded it, he saw Kennedy’s at the top. It had a name.
“I told him this is very misleading and very undemocratic,” Pearlstein said. The man reportedly responded, “I won’t cause any more trouble.”
The second time, Pearlstein said he was approached by a young man who said he was a student and wanted to make some money on the side. Pearlstein echoed concerns about misleading petitions. “It was like he didn’t really understand,” Pearlstein said.
Pearlstein said his wife had received other contacts and reported the matter to state election officials.
A spokesperson for the New York State Board of Elections referred questions to the board’s Election Law Enforcement Division, which did not respond to a request for comment.
Bernstein, the judge, also reported the encounter to state authorities. And he was standing on the subway platform last week when he felt a tap on his shoulder.
It was the same man asking if I wanted to sign the same petition.
She responded with a typical New York question: “Are you kidding?”
Nick Colasaniti Contributed to the report.
