The Village of Pelham Manor and representatives of the Committee to Move the Manor Village Election are battling in state court over the rejection by the municipality of a 801-signature petition calling for a referendum to change the date Manor voters go to the polls.
Erica Winter, an organizer of the committee, delivered the petition on July 1 to Village Manager Lindsey Luft, who in her role as village clerk reviewed and rejected the petition four days later, on July 5, according to court papers. Winter and Pelham Democratic Town Committee Chairwoman Allison Frost brought a civil suit July 8 in state Supreme Court seeking to reverse that decision and force the proposition on to the November ballot. If approved by voters, the referendum would move the village’s elections from March to the date of the general election in November.
Luft, the Village of Pelham Manor Board of Trustees and the Westchester County Board of Elections are all defendants in the lawsuit.
Luft would not provide the Pelham Examiner with the letter she sent to Winter detailing the reasons she found the petition invalid, even though that letter is a public document. In a brief email, she said the Pelham Examiner “may complete” a Freedom of Information Law request for it. “This topic is quite complex,” Luft said. “There is pending litigation underway, so I feel it is appropriate to respectfully decline commentary.”
Winter, who was quite available when the petition drive was announced, has not replied to a request for comment. Frost declined to comment.
While Luft wouldn’t make the letter available, her reasons for rejecting the petition were detailed in an affidavit filed by her lawyers in state court on July 18.
Ballot initiatives are limited to specific questions set forth in the New York Village Law, Luft said in the affidavit. “Here, the petition for referendum introduced topics that go beyond such questions and therefore misled signatories as to what matters can be the subject of the referendum,” she said.
According to the affidavit, reasons Luft used to rule the petition did not comply with state law included:
- The petition went beyond the statutory language in the village law in that it specifically called for Pelham Manor elections to move to general election day in November, rather stating only the language from the law for a referendum question in a village: “Whether or not the month of the general election should be changed.”
- The petition calls for future village elections to be run by the Westchester Board of Election when state election law permits only the village board of trustees to determine if the board of elections should manage voting.
- The petition seeks to define what the terms of office will be for previously elected mayors and trustees once elections move to November.
- A technical deficiency with the petitions, in that the statement of witness (which is the person gathering signatures) at the bottom of every page uses the phrase “subscribed his name in my presence” rather than—Luft quoting from state election law in the affidavit—”subscribed the same in my presence on the dates above indicated and identified himself or herself to be the individual who signed this sheet.”
From a review of the court filings so far by both sides—37 documents through July 22 and available on Westchester Records Online—it appears that state Supreme Court Judge Linda Jamieson will have to reconcile different and conflicting language found in the separate state laws governing villages and elections, as well as previous court decisions.
John Murtagh, the attorney representing Luft and the Pelham Manor village board, relied on the same reasons as Luft when filing a July 18 legal memorandum supporting a motion to dismiss the lawsuit.
‘Never intended to be fair or objective’
However, Jeffrey Gasbarro, attorney for Winter and Frost, countered Murtagh and Luft’s arguments on July 22 with other citations from both New York Village Law and New York Election Law in writing to oppose the motion to dismiss and to ask the judge to approve the petition for the referendum. In the case of the deficiency in the witness statement, Gasbarro wrote, the language used in the petition “precisely mirrors” that found in the state’s village law, while the version cited by Luft in her affidavit is required for political party nominating petitions and found instead in the election law.
“The village clerk’s hyper-technical analysis of the wording of the witness statement further establishes that the village clerk’s review of this petition was never intended to be fair or objective,” Gasbarro wrote.
He also wrote that the petition needed to specify election day in November—or some date—for the change because literally enforcing the language Luft required would produce the “absurd result” that the petition could not even list the month the election would be moved to by the proposed ballot proposition. Further, state election law says that a proposition is permitted to “change ‘the date’ of the general village election,” he said.
It’s not known who is funding Winter and Frost’s lawsuit. The village’s defense of its rejection of a 801-signature petition for a referendum on changing election days is, of course, being paid for by the municipality’s taxpayers.
The current fight comes six years after a previous effort failed when then Village Manager and Village Clerk John Pierpont rejected a petition in 2018 for a referendum on moving election day because he said 162 of the 532 signatures were invalid, meaning the petition missed the 400-signature minimum. Additionally, he said the petition did not have the required page numbers. Pierpont’s decision was upheld in state court.
In the Village of Pelham, residents voted to move elections to November in 2019. That petition was initially rejected by then Village Clerk Terri Rourke, also due to an absence of page numbers, but the village board of trustees voted 5-2 before the election in March 2019 to include a referendum on that ballot. The proposition was approved 812 to 498.
As of 11:30 a.m. on July 30, Judge Jamieson had issued no decisions or orders in the current case, according to Westchester Records Online.
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