Top lawyers for Tiffany Cabán, Melinda Katz and the New York City Board of Elections will take their proceedings on the road to a hearing at the board’s Queens office. While the primary results are certified for the Queens District Attorney race, a judge will review 70 ballots the lawyers have flagged: 28 affidavit ballots on which the voter did not write the word “Democrat” on the envelope and 42 other ballots from the manual recount.
This kind of scrutiny is largely the result of a small group of experts who have a corner on New York State election law and, in turn, benefit from the business that expertise generates. They’re willing to clash swords with each other over seemingly inane details to protect clients, build up a case law along the way, and sometimes reap the rewards of being so close to political leadership.
Election lawyers toil in minutiae. They scrutinize petitions, signatures, and coversheets to ensure their candidate’s name appears on the ballot, and in some cases, to knock opponents off. The work extends into the post-election recanvass, overseeing any recount and providing vigorous advocacy in subsequent court proceedings.
Many of these experts got their starts in 1970s New York City politics. Martin Connor, the former state senator, was a young lawyer at a private firm when a friend recruited him to take on the political machine in Brooklyn.
Listen to Brigid Bergin's story on the elite election lawyers fighting out the Queens DA primary recount here:
“He was involved in the local Reform Democratic Club—insurgents—like these young people,” Connor said last month, nodding in the direction of volunteers for the Cabán campaign during the recount of ballots. As the eventual reform club’s president, Connor used election law to challenge the old Brooklyn machine. Now, decades later, he’s with Katz, who’s seen as the establishment candidate.
Connor is working alongside Michael Reich, with the firm Sweeney, Reich and Bolz, who’s also backing Katz. Reich and his partners work for all the candidates endorsed by the Queens County Democrats for no charge.
“I like to say they can't hire us, because we decide who we want to support, because we're volunteers,” said Reich who began his political career during the George McGovern presidential campaign in 1972.
He and his partners have an incentive to keep the party strong: their firm has raked in millions of dollars administering estates through Surrogate's Court, a function tightly woven into the party machine.
(Bronx election lawyer Stanley Schlein was also at the recount and court proceedings for Katz.)
And then there’s the attorney who wrote the book on election law, Jerry Goldfeder, who’s currently working for the Cabán campaign.
Sarah Steiner in her office (Brigid Bergin / WNYC)
The elite attorneys fighting this particular case in Queens are older white men. That’s one reason Sarah Steiner, one of the only female election attorneys working in this rarified world, would like to see more people join her.
“I'd like to see more younger people and more women come into the field,” Steiner said in a recent interview. The political bug bit her in the 1970’s, first working on the congressional campaign for Jonathan Bingham and later running the Bronx field office for Ed Koch’s mayoral campaign. Through those experiences, Steiner said she learned the intricacies of petitions and ballot access..
“You need women who pull up the chair to the table in the back room and say, ‘so what are we talking about here, guys?’” Steiner said in an interview.
Steiner has mentored Ali Najmi, one of the few younger, non-white election law attorneys in New York City. His origin story is a lot like the elders of election arcana: as a kid growing up in Glen Oaks, Queens, he got involved with local politics.
“My first taste of petitions and and checking other people's petitions came from the Queens Democratic Organization and going down there to Austin Street seeing how it's all done,” Najmi said, referring to the party’s office in Forest Hills.
With the DA race coming down to a battle that pits the old guard election experts against each other, Najmi is hoping to attend the court hearings.
“It's really fascinating to see these titans of election law, competing against each other,” said Najmi, “so I might just be there to watch the show.”
Brigid Bergin is the City Hall and politics reporter for WNYC. You can follow her on Twitter at @brigidbergin.
