Did you notice that some on our City Council are claiming that:
(1) there is no such thing as voter fraud (vote-buying), or
(2) that even if there is voter fraud it does not impact election outcomes, or
(3) there is voter fraud but it won't impact election outcomes in low turnout runoff elections because there aren't enough paid votes to be decisive!
Now, some might call all that a cacophony of bullshit, but not me.
Because I agree with Councilmen Mike Russo and Ruben Ramos: there is no such thing as vote-buying in Hoboken!
Never was.
And I'm going to prove it.
NO VOTE-BUYING HERE!
In the 2015 municipal election, incumbent 3rd Ward Council Mike Russo ran for re-election against...
NOBODY.
And that is why Russo for Council paid an army of 5th ward septuagenarians and 4th ward residents to get the one vote he needed to win his unopposed election!
Make sense? It does!
Yep, 248 workers from the 4th & 5th wards were paid a total of $14,140 to get Mike Russo one vote in his unopposed 3rd Ward election!
81 of Russo for Council's paid workers came from Fox Hill senior housing in the 5th Ward!
Russo for Council's 248 paid campaign workers worked so hard for his one vote, they each got paid $50!
Note: the 4th ward candidate was Ruben Ramos, the 5th Ward candidate was Eduardo Gonzalez. Both had opponents.
Make sense? It does!
Yep, 248 workers from the 4th & 5th wards were paid a total of $14,140 to get Mike Russo one vote in his unopposed 3rd Ward election!
81 of Russo for Council's paid workers came from Fox Hill senior housing in the 5th Ward!
Russo for Council's 248 paid campaign workers worked so hard for his one vote, they each got paid $50!
- Russo for Council's campaign workers who reside in the 3rd ward are highlighted GREY
- Russo for Council's campaign workers who reside in the 4th ward are highlighted BLUE
- Russo for Council's campaign workers who reside in the 5th ward are highlighted YELLOW
Note: the 4th ward candidate was Ruben Ramos, the 5th Ward candidate was Eduardo Gonzalez. Both had opponents.
RUSSO FOR COUNCIL'S CAMPAIGN WORKERS
(source- Russo for Council, 20 Day Post-Election report filed on December 17, 2015)
Click any image to enlarge
I realize that $14K is a lot of money to spend on 248 campaign workers to win an unopposed election.
But Mike Russo was right to hire 248 campaign workers from wards 4 and 5, pay them each $50 to make sure that he won his election honestly to prove that there's no vote-buying in Hoboken!
ReplyDeleteQuiet GA. This is not a good look for Tiff-Jen-Peter. They don't want anyone asking questions about why they are allying with Ruben and Russo and Michael DeFusco to push for an end runoffs. Tiff-Jen-Peter don't want anyone to ask questions about what they are doing to curb this behavior when they know that as members of the City Council, they could take action, if they want. They could pass a resolution. They could write a letter to the AG calling attention to the problem. They work to devise a local ordinance making it illegal to engage in this behavior. They are not powerless, they are choosing to act as if they are. They've opened the door to increasing the influence of voter fraud by allowing runoffs. It's incumbent on them to take concrete, clear action to address voter fraud, especially since they say it exists. Will they?
If they wanted to take action to minimize the impact of voter fraud, the first thing you do is eliminate runoffs. We did that already and they want to undo that decision.
Deletethank you, GA. makes the head spin, and makes the sellouts look more complicit every day.
ReplyDeletebtw, it shouldn't go unnoticed that this is exactly the type of story another blog in town used to be all over. there was a time when if he didn't connect the dots and uncover the story himself, he would at least piggyback on (some would say "steal") your post in followup to provide additional exposure. today? not a chance. actual corruption doesn't mean squat to him now, more important to violate people's privacy with nothing burger text messages.
it's all up to you now, GA.
Pouah. Cette merde folle m'a laissé seul sur le champ de bataille. J'ai besoin de plus de troupes. C'est ridicule!
Deletetu es resté fidèle à la cause et à tes valeurs, c'est tout ce que tu peux faire.
DeleteMerci "moi". You et d'autres qui soutiennent un bon gouvernement et s'opposent à la corruption locale gardent les lumières allumées. Je suis reconnaissant pour votre.
Deleteet je suis reconnaissant pour google translate.
DeleteMy favorite Tiffanie Fisher argument is that voter fraud is decreasing because of "displacement."
ReplyDeleteShe is so full of crap that she smells like a walking pile of horse manure.
DeleteCan anyone please explain to me why this specific referendum needs to be revisited after six years but not the pay-to-play referendum of 2004? The MSTA initiatives on rent control? Or the waterfront referendum of the early 90s for that matter? Why not move the Board of Ed elections back to April and have a referendum on that? Moving them to November was done by the board itself, not by referendum. Let the people decide?
ReplyDeleteSeriously, if the argument is "the people" need to re-decide these things every so often to ensure the verdict reflects the most current constituency, why isn't everything on the table, instead of this narrowly targeted effort that Fisher all but openly admits is designed to remedy the specific circumstances that led to an outcome she deemed unfavorable in one particular election?
It seems to me the answer is fairly obvious -- we aren't putting pay-to-play or rent control or waterfront development on the ballot every few years because we have consensus around the inherent wisdom the voters showed in the decisions they made, and have no need to waste time, money, goodwill and downside risk on re-validating these decisions just in case there are newer residents who may disagree. It sounds silly just suggesting it. Because it is. That's why good-government people are opposed to revisiting the runoff question, while those with nefarious, self-serving agendas have formed an unholy alliance behind it.
Please post this in response to Mike's letter to the editor. It is awesome.
DeleteThe whole thing is too specious for words. But specious words are precisely what Mike Lenz served up in the paper this weekend, which bears mentioning. Mike's argument, if I understand it correctly, is that not having a runoff (a) gives us a mayor who got less than 50% of the vote; (b) gives an advantage to "toxic campaigns" that "smeared" their opponents, and (c) voter fraud and vote buying are not a significant factor in runoff elections.
ReplyDeleteWhat I find curious about Mike's argument is that while I could be mistaken, I don't recall hearing any of this from him when Zimmer was first elected mayor in a special election that had no runoff - an election in which she won with less than 50% of the vote, and which resulted in her vacating her council seat and appointing Mike to fill it. I don't recall him complaining about any of this one bit. What's more, if memory serves, that special election did in fact feature a particularly toxic campaign riddled with daily smears about "Dual Job Dawn," lottery tickets and everything else but the kitchen sink. The campaign Mike seems to be alleging to be toxic, Bhalla's, offended Giattino supporters like Mike by telling the truth about their candidate's coy, evasive manner of telling people what they wanted to hear while dodging any questions about where she actually stood on any issues important to voters. Conversely, the Giattino campaign and its surrogates relentlessly attacked Bhalla for being forthright about his stances, which is what a candidate is SUPPOSED to do, and also dropped ugly innuendo about him being "unelectable," which many took to be a smear on his ethnic and religious profile.
In the special election that put Dawn in the mayor's chair and Mike on the city council, Beth Mason employed a cavalcade of professional smear artists, from Paul Swibinsky to Ryan Yacco to James Barracato, as well as the usual peanut gallery of toxic surrogates like the Keim kooks and Bajardi twins - to tear down and denigrate Dawn's character, ethics, family, you name it. Yet despite Lenz's argument today that toxic smear campaigns are advantaged in one-and-done elections, the effect we saw and he benefited from in 2009 was quite the opposite - Mason's nastiness backfired spectacularly and as far as many voters were concerned, she disqualified herself simply by running a dirty campaign.
Mike can treat the voters like they're dumb if it makes him feel better, but nobody's buying what he's selling - Ravi ran a perfectly above-board campaign, and sometimes, the truth hurts - even as it sets the rest of us free.
Our election system is far from perfect, and we have a long way to go toward cleaning it up to the optimal degree. Having a healthy debate about different methods and ideas for increasing election integrity is always a good thing. Hearing disingenuous pretzel logic from a man whose own hubris torpedoed any shot he had at keeping his council seat when he decided to have lunch at the Coach House with a campaign donor who had development business pending before the city is not something that advances that discussion in any positive way.
Great read, PS. The sad record shows that this is the only site left where this quality of argument will appear. But you can at least expect to be ridiculed by the usual emotionally and intellectually stunted suspects on the other sites in lieu of any sort of grown-up counterpoint.
DeleteThis blog is clearly a major burr under the saddle of the permanently butt-hurt. It provided the subtext of the column that was spoon-fed to Al on 2/4 about how wrong it is to paint Jen as going to "the dark side." That was, after all, not a charge overheard at a city council meeting.
This week Mike refers to "the blogs" getting vote buying wrong. But he means GA. Except for promoting a cockamamie alliance between Bhalla and Russo and disclaiming that it favors instant runoffs, MSV avoids the subject. And no one attempts to debate anything on HCV, which has been ruined by feces throwing butt-hurts -- who not coincidentally often turn out to be climate change mocking Trump apologists.
"The blogs" in question are... this blog. It's strange to run to the Reporter to complain about it. But the nouveau old guard, in contrast to its predecessor, knows it can't wish the internet away. But neither can they bring it to heel by bitching to Al and throwing feces at it on HCV. They have a problem, and we're it.
Mike is smart enough to know that the faithful need to be given something more than MSV's conspiracy theories and doggerel from the "Resistance." Because those tactics leave the impression - in the adult population - that there is no countering argument to make. So Mike makes one, albeit a poor one and delivered to the anti-reform swamp that is the HR's readership. But the alternative would be to come here and try it, and none of them have the courage of their convictions for that. Save for Indie whose thought process is too corrupt to merit reply.
American libertarians tend to be republicans who don't support the legislation of morality. They may be anti-abortion and homophobic themselves, but they don't see enforcement as a proper role for a small government. Jen voted libertarian in the last election after twice serving as a republican convention delegate. Anyone who is buying her conversion to democrat is simply not very bright. Hudson democrats have always welcomed republicans for whom access to power was more important than their conservative principles. They have just welcomed another. Jen has dropped all pretense of being anything other than what she was first suspected of being right here. It remains to be seen whether op-ed malarkey and feces is enough to cover it up. Doubtful.
It was from Mike - and nobody who pays attention believes a damn thing that man says. Only the desperate or clueless pay attention to him.
DeleteRavi calling Jen a Republican when that's exactly what she was counts as a "toxic smear" that caused her to land in fourth place? Sounds like Lenz needs a trip down memory lane...
DeleteLenz knows from dirty campaigns. He's completely talking out of his ass. He was on the receiving end of all the Mason/Russo/411 trash when he ran (though in hindsight a lot of what they said about him had a ring of truth), he was on the receiving end of it when he backed Dawn for council and then mayor and she got smeared as a housewife beholden to a county hack (Lenz IS a county hack, but Dawn was never beholden to him), he was on the receiving end of a dirty campaign when he ran Marsh for Assembly against Stack's team and landed himself his county job.
And when he managed Marsh's mayoral campaign, the Roberts team hired Buddy Demelier to pump out smear mailers almost daily. One mailer even accused Carol, who was running on an anti pay-to-play and anti-development platform, of calling a Secaucus developer to solicit a donation, being told they didn't build in Hoboken, and asking them whether they planned to do so in the future.
Oh wait, does something count as a smear if it's actually true?
http://www.hudsonreporter.com/pages/full_story/push?article-Marsh+asks+developer+for+donation+Roberts+advisor+calls+move+-hypocritical-%20&id=2404206
It is why they hate this site. The truth makes them look pretty bad.
Delete