Off-the-wall New York State election law prime for trickery, as spoiler candidates snatch extra ballot lines

Suffolk County isn’t the lone place where the Working Families Party has had its ballot line raided.

Rockland and Rensselaer also have been hotbeds of skirmishes over the tactic of running a spoiler candidate affiliated with a major party in a WFP primary to effectively hijack the progressive minor party’s ballot line. In the recent case of the close election for Huntington town supervisor, a spoiler candidate played a major role in a narrow Republican victory.

Call it political hardball. Call it political opportunism — but it’s not illegal.

And as long as New York remains one of two states with "fusion voting" where candidates can appear on multiple ballot lines — think: Democrat and WFP; Republican and Conservative — there seems to be no easy fix to prevent ballot raiding, experts say.

"It happens where elections are close and if people think they can get a leg up in a close race, they try it," Jerry Goldfeder, a veteran elections lawyer, said. "It’s a consequence of fusion voting."

Fusion voting means more than one political party can back a candidate. It was widely used in the early 20th century but is now severely limited.

Only New York and Connecticut allow a candidate to be listed on separate ballot lines under separate parties and allow votes from the different lines to be aggregated. That’s how we get, say, a Democrat running in a WFP primary or a Republican running in a Conservative primary.

Fast forward to 2025. Democrat-endorsed Cooper Macco ran in a June WFP primary in the Huntington supervisor’s race but lost to Maria Delgado. In November, Macco lost to incumbent Republican Ed Smyth by 602 votes while Delgado garnered 1,195.

WFP officials have cried foul, saying Delgado was a spoiler candidate whose presence in the primary and November elections was meant to take away votes from Macco, whom they endorsed. Republicans have said they had no role in Delgado’s campaign; Newsday has reported, though, a Huntington town employee and fire commissioner carried Delgado petitions to get her in the race.

'Fake candidate'

Similar spoiler candidates have appeared in Rockland and Rensselaer on the WFP ballot line.

In 2024, the WFP said about 200 people suddenly enrolled as members in the 17th Congressional District — a swing district key to control of the House of Representatives, held by Republican Rep. Mike Lawler — and worked to garner a primary victory for unknown candidate Anthony Frascone over Mondaire Jones, a Democrat who was the WFP’s preferred choice.

That October, the WFP even held news conferences to urge their party members "don’t vote for a fake candidate" on their own ballot line.

In the end, Lawler (R-Pearl River) defeated Jones by a close margin.

In Rensselaer in 2021, WFP members said  22 spoiler candidates gathered petitions to run in town and county elections.

A lawsuit to knock some of them off the ballot eventually was thrown out. But a related criminal probe resulted in a Republican Troy city councilor pleading guilty to fraudulently submitting absentee ballots in the primary and general elections and a Republican elections commissioner pleading guilty to using the names and birth dates of voters to fraudulently apply for absentee ballots.

Three other officials went to trial and were acquitted.

Jasmine Gripper, WFP co-director, said ballot raiding is occurring in just 1% of their primaries "but it is still frustrating to the voters."

Gripper said “99% of the time” there is no WFP primary because the party typically endorses a candidate (usually a Democrat) and no spoiler emerges to file petitions to challenge. But occasionally, a candidate such as Delgado submits petitions to take on the party’s preferred choice.

"There are bad actors across the state looking to take advantage of multiple ballot lines," Gripper said.

"We are doing everything in our power" to prevent it, she said, but the party "will need help from the State Legislature and governor."

Possible fixes

A party can "disenroll" voters it believes don’t really support its political goals and who essentially are infiltrating it to influence primaries. But it’s a long and costly process and, even if removed, a voter always could re-enroll later.

It’s possible the State Legislature — dominated by Democrats who largely agree with the WFP on most issues — could enact laws to give a party central committee more power over its ballot line. That’s important because the WFP — unlike Democrats, Republicans or Conservatives — has no county committees where rank-and-file members regularly police things like ballot petitioning.

But it’s unclear whether the legislature would want to pass a law just to help one minor party; or whether doing so could have unseen consequences in the future.

Besides, some say the Huntington episode is mostly the WFP’s fault and a function of a fusion-vote system the party has long backed. The party should have worked harder to win the June primary for Macco or spread the word to the rank-and-file to not vote for Delgado in November.

"The only way something like this can happen is if both the state and local organizations of these minor parties are asleep at the switch," Lawrence Levy, dean of suburban studies at Hofstra University, said.

And it’s likely going to happen just in races where a few hundred or a few thousand votes can change the outcome.

"Wherever a political operative might see an opportunity, the system of multiple ballot lines makes it easier to play the games we saw in Huntington," Levy said. "It’s a system that’s easy to take advantage of. If you want to end this, you end the practice of being able to run on multiple lines. It’s just an invitation to gamesmanship."

By Yancey Roy

yancey.roy@newsday.com@yanceyroy