By Michelle Han
One week after officially filing as a candidate hoping to unseat U.S. Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-Forest Hills), City Councilman Noach Dear (D-Brooklyn) began flinging accusations at his longtime rival, who returned the blows.
Dear's campaign manager, Harris Leitstein, last week charged Weiner with using “a pitifully weak ploy” by challenging the petitions the councilman had filed in order to get on the ballot this fall.
Challenging the signatures an opponent gathers is a longstanding practice in New York state elections. The Board of Elections recommends that candidates gather as many as three times the number of signatures required to get on the ballot in the event that some signatures may be deemed invalid if challenged.
But Leitstein said the loosening of state election laws last year made it easier for candidates to get on the ballot, making it less fruitful to challenge petitions.
“Some people do it if they're desperate to get their opponent off the ballot,” Leitstein said. “Our attitude was we're going to file, he's going to file and then we'll move on to the heat of the campaign.”
The Board of Elections no longer requires candidates to submit the exact number of signatures that have been collected. Instead, candidates must sign a statement saying they have collected more than the required number of signatures and the petitions are not scrutinized by the board unless an objection is made.
The objections to Dear's petitions, however, did not come from the Weiner campaign but from individual constituents, said Weiner's spokeswoman, Serena Torrey.
Torrey noted that the Federal Election Commission earlier this year ordered Dear to repay more than $500,000 of the $1.6 million raised in his unsuccessful campaign against Weiner in 1998, and that Dear was found guilty in 1993 of siphoning funds from a Jewish charity he ran.
“The FEC has found Councilman Dear guilty of violating campaign finance laws. The attorney general has found Councilman Dear embezzled funds from a charity. Is it any wonder that the councilman's effort to run for Congress on the Democratic and Republican lines is coming under scrutiny now?” Torrey said in a statement.
In an unusual twist, Dear, a conservative Democrat with a strong constituency among Orthodox Jews in Borough Park, Brooklyn, is running against Weiner on both the Democratic and Republican lines. Registered Democrats in Weiner's 9th Congressional District outnumber Republicans by a margin of 3-to-1 according to the state Board of Elections.
No other candidate for Congress from New York City in this fall's local elections has gathered nominating petitions from both registered Democrats and Republicans.
