Voting in Bloomingburg

Posted 8/21/12

The turmoil in Bloomingburg continues, with developer Shalom Lamm and his supporters going to court and fighting local officials over seemingly every issue that arises. Most recently the courts …

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Voting in Bloomingburg

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The turmoil in Bloomingburg continues, with developer Shalom Lamm and his supporters going to court and fighting local officials over seemingly every issue that arises. Most recently the courts decided that even though Lamm’s property was annexed into the village illegally, it was done too long ago for residents to do anything about it. The Town of Mamakating plans to appeal.

The fight, of course, is really about the 396-unit development that Lamm is building in the village that is being marketed to the Hasidic community. Lamm and his supporters say those in the village and town who oppose it, do so out of a prejudice against Hasidic Jews. That may be partly true.

But it’s also true that a 396-unit townhouse is going to have an enormous impact on a village of about 300 people regardless of whether it’s inhabited by Hasidic Jews, Lutherans or Buddhists, so the argument that some people may simply want to retain the rural community character also may be true.

It’s also true that the project was first pitched to the community as a development of low-density vacation homes on a golf course.

In any case, the two sides want different outcomes for the town. Lamm and his supporters want the village to remain a village, and there is little doubt that when his development is full of people, those people will surely come to dominate village government.

A majority of longtime residents want the village to be dissolved and want the Town of Mamkating to take over the administrative functions of the village. The population that eventually lives in the 396-unit development will have much less power if the village is dissolved into the Town of Mamakating, with a population of more than 12,000. So this continuing epic court battle is really about which group of people will control the future of the tiny village, probably for decades into the future.

With the stakes so high, one would hope there would be good laws in place about who is allowed to vote and who is not allowed to vote. But that does not seem to be the case. In both the referendum for the dissolution of the village in September 2014 and in the vote for a village trustee in March, voters who were challenged, and who were deemed ineligible to vote by the Sullivan County Board of Elections (BOE), were allowed to vote, and their votes were counted.

That fact, especially regarding the March election, bears repeating: BOE determined on February 27 that those 27 challenged voters whose votes swung the election to Lamm’s candidate were not eligible to vote because they did not live in Bloomingburg.

In the first legal battle of the two sides over voter fraud in March and April of 2014, Judge Stephan Schick issued subpoenas for about 90 of the challenged voters, including Lamm, to appear in court and explain why they had a right to vote in Bloomingburg. Not one of the challenged voters, including Lamm, honored the subpoenas with an appearance in the courtroom.

Lamm’s lawyer at the time told the court that his client had decided to withdraw from the legal battle, and would no longer contest the determination of the Sullivan County Board of Elections that more than 100 of the people who had cast affidavit ballots, including Lamm, were not eligible to vote.

Schick was outraged. He said that voting is one of the central acts of a democracy, and when a person, or more than 100 people in this case, claim that their right to vote has been violated, as was the case in this matter, it is a very serious charge. He said it is “very telling” that none of the challenged voters appeared to defend their right to vote.

Schick noted that he heard a voter-challenge case in November 2013, and in that case many of the voters were anxious to take the stand and explain how, in their view, their right to vote had been violated.

Now, however, some of those same challenged voters, who ignored subpoenas in 2014, were allowed to vote in two subsequent polls. The most recent was on March 18 of this year, and the votes of the challenged voters were counted in an agreement between BOE and Lamm’s attorney, agreed to by another judge, despite BOE’s earlier determination. And the challenged votes were ordered mixed together with non-challenged votes, even though BOE had previously ordered that the challenged votes be segregated.

An attorney working with BOE said the relevant statutes weren’t created to deal with voter fraud on a small scale such as in a village of 300 people. If that’s true the county legislature should urgently be contacting their representatives in Albany to come up with a legislative fix.

Because the appearance here, if not the actual fact, is that anyone with enough money to hire a clever lawyer can walk into a village in rural New York and steal an election.

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