To appear on a New York City voter’s ballot, mayoral candidates must submit thousands of signatures to the city’s Board of Elections.
But no election official vets or verifies the names. Instead, the board relies on rival candidates and engaged voters to challenge the forms, known as ballot petitions, within days after they’re submitted.
The lack of official enforcement and oversight allowed Mayor Eric Adams’ campaign to submit documents to appear on November’s ballot with patterns of forgery and fraud that went unnoticed by election watchers, rival candidates, and – according to Adams – his own campaign.
In his independent re-election bid, Adams skipped the Democratic primary and on May 20 turned in nearly 50,000 signatures for a pair of ballot lines. Under city law, challengers had less than a week to object to any of the signatures. However, most of Adams’ opponents were running in a crowded Democratic primary and busy trying to meet other election-related paperwork deadlines.
Gothamist recently reviewed the signatures the Adams campaign submitted to the Board of Elections and spoke to dozens of New Yorkers who say their signatures were forged or that they were misled into signing. Gothamist’s investigation demonstrated how the city’s reliance on peer enforcement undermines the election system. It also raises questions about whether the petitioning system, which was designed in the 19th century to compel a candidate to prove a minimum level of support, is still up to the task.
A Board of Elections official acknowledged that the administrative body only checks that a candidate has met the necessary threshold to appear on the ballot — 7,500 signatures in the case of the mayor’s race.
Deputy Executive Director Vincent Ignizio said it’s up to local district attorneys to determine whether an investigation into the signatures is warranted.
“The elections process in general and the petitions process in particular should not be the victim of fraud,” Ignizio said. “A person signing other people’s names is straight-up fraud and, ultimately, it’s for the prosecutors in the city, upon being made aware of it, to pursue should they seek to.”
Spokespeople for the city’s five district attorney’s offices have declined to comment on the findings of Gothamist’s investigation.
The board is charged with following regulations established by state lawmakers, Ignizio said.
“ They send us the laws and we will ultimately abide by them, which is what we’re doing here,” he said. “We’re a ministerial agency that is here to ensure elections are run well, but challenging petitions is a process that is up to the public or the other campaigns.”
Candidates said they simply didn’t have the time to review and challenge Adams’ signatures in the heat of the Democratic primary, which Adams skipped. When Adams filed his signatures, candidates faced an imminent deadline for campaign finance disclosures tied to matching funds.
“If we spent all our time trying to hold Eric Adams accountable for breaking the law, we wouldn’t have time to actually campaign for mayor,” said Dora Pekec, a spokesperson for Democratic nominee Zohran Mamdani.
Adams’ rivals faced another hurdle: the sheer volume of signatures on more than 4,000 pages of petitions.
“When a campaign like Eric Adams’ submits tens of thousands of signatures more than the required number, it becomes nearly impossible to prove that enough of them are invalid for a court to decide to throw an opponent off the ballot,” said Aaron Foldenauer, an election attorney for independent candidate Jim Walden.
Foldenauer said flagging irregularities is just half the battle because only a court can rule on questions of fraud, meaning rival candidates must invest additional time and money into their challenge.
“Given the enormous resources that it would require an opponent to mount a challenge, it’s hard to justify the enormous amount of time and money to challenge a candidate in a situation like this,” he added.
Last week, Adams downplayed the significance of the bogus signatures as “part of the business” of politics and said he had been singled out for scrutiny. His campaign spent more than $400,000 on ballot petitioning, finance records show.
Adams’ campaign spokesperson, Todd Shapiro, told Gothamist on Monday that the campaign has not been contacted by any law enforcement agency or the Board of Elections.
“He didn’t break any rules, he didn’t break any laws,” Shapiro said of the mayor.
Adams campaign attorney Vito Pitta has previously said the campaign plans to hire a “special counsel” to review the signatures submitted to the Board of Elections.
Adams, who was elected as a Democrat in 2021, opted to run as an independent for re-election on a pair of ballot lines, “EndAntisemitism” and “Safe&Affordable.” He is challenging an order from the city’s Board of Elections to choose just one.
As part of the investigation into the signatures, Gothamist spoke with more than 100 people by phone and knocked on more than 200 doors at addresses where people who supposedly signed the forms indicated that they lived. Gothamist spoke with people who said their name was misspelled in a signature they did not recognize, or that they were out of the country at the time they supposedly signed. Gothamist identified the signatures of three dead people.
The 52 signatures identified through the investigation were collected by nine signature gatherers who submitted more than 5,000 signatures total.
Election lawyers were divided on whether the current system for submitting signatures to get on the ballot needed an overhaul.
Election lawyer Sarah Steiner said the petitioning process ought to be changed or entirely abandoned in New York state.
“ It’s nothing at this point except for a business for petitioning consultants to overcharge candidates,” Steiner said, adding it creates “all sorts of anxiety in the campaigns.”
“It’s a 19th century system,” said Steiner, referencing ballot access laws that date back to 1890. “And we need to change it.”
But Jared Kasschau, a lawyer who represented New Yorkers suing Robert F. Kennedy over his ballot petitioning tactics, said the system ensures candidates meet a certain level of support and prevents the ballot from being crowded with obscure candidates.
“ The system works if the objections are raised within the compressed timeframe that we have to operate under,” Kasschau said. “But if the objections aren’t raised, then it becomes a problem.”
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
