A defeated Tim Carney walked out of the Albany County Judicial Center on Friday, Aug. 6, after an intense review of the validity of signatures he submitted forced him off the primary ballot as a candidate for the 46th Senate District.
Candidates are required to have 1,000 signatures in order to be placed on the September primary ballot, but three of Carney’s 1,001 remaining signatures were ruled invalid, leaving him with only 998 signatures.
It’s just a shame I have to be forced out on a technicality, Carney said to the judge. `I still think there are 1,000 good signatures.`
The result, handed down by State Supreme Court Justice Roger D. McDonough, left only one candidate, former prosecutor in the Office of Sex Offender Management in the Division of Criminal Justice Services Luke Martland, to face incumbent Sen. Neil Breslin, D-Delmar, in September.
Carney took issue with the Democratic Party Board of Elections after a clerical error, which originally ruled 1,034 of his 1,205 were valid. An error that he said they apologized for.
`A lot of the issues are with the record keeping of the Board of Elections,` Carney said outside of the courtroom. `It’s poor, it’s antiquated and it needs a new system in regards to this. There are over 30 different ways with these technicalities you can be thrown out.`
Signatures can be ruled invalid if they are illegible, a wrong address is written down, or if two signatures from one person that do not look alike.
Carney called the Board of Elections `incompetent,` saying parts of the process of ruling signatures invalid are opinion-based, such as deciding whether a signature is legible.
`In regards to someone’s signature and handwriting ` and there’s no expertise on that ` it’s subjective to all parties involved,` he said. `And when they were invalidated we could not participate in there. So it’s up to the Board of Elections.`
Fear is what Carney believes drove Martland to review his signatures and force him out based on technicalities.
`He was scared of me as an opponent,` he said. `I felt that I had better name recognition and better ideas. He hopes there’s enough voter discontent, that just despite nobody knows who he is, they would vote for him.`
Carney, who calls himself a community activist and businessman, said he believes it is impossible for people other than lawyers, such as Martland, to successfully run for any office.
`It’s just disheartening that we have to come to this point, that the lawyers are in control,` he said. `The average citizen can no longer participate in the system.`
After the decision, McDonough sympathized with Carney as he called the election laws a `complicated and Byzantine process,` but added that Carney should have had a lawyer on retainer.
In a released statement, Martland expressed his gratitude toward McDonough for ordering Democratic Party Board of Election Commissioner Matthew Clyne to provide evidence that Carney’s signatures were valid.
`I am gratified that Judge McDonough ordered the Board of Elections to provide their evidence and that the Board finally agreed with us that a significant number of Carney’s signatures were invalid,` Martland said in the release.
Martland spokesman Larry Sombke said after reviewing the signatures submitted by Carney they discovered he did not have enough valid signatures to be on the ballot. He declined to comment on statements made by Carney as well as statements made by McDonough. He added they will now focus on the issues and will run a `very active campaign.`
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