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"ALBANY — State Republican Party headquarters in Albany served as a final hub of a dubious petitioning effort that's since sparked controversy and a Democrat-led call for a criminal investigation. The petitioning centered on statewide Republican candidates seeking to run on an additional, key ballot line in the November election by reviving the moribund state Independence Party. This spring, the GOP attempted a massive petitioning effort, spearheaded in part by the Republican gubernatorial campaign of U.S. Rep. Lee Zeldin of Long Island. A spokeswoman for the state Republican Party, Jessica Proud, confirmed to the Times Union that signed Independence Party petitions were later dropped at their party headquarters on State Street in Albany — and bound in volumes at the party office — before submission to the state Board of Elections on the May 31 deadline.  Of 52,000 signatures submitted, more than 11,000 were determined by the Board of Elections to be photocopies copies of other, original signatures within those same records. The copied pages were interspersed in a manner leading some election experts to conclude their inclusion may have been intentional, possibly to inflate the number of signatures to surpass the daunting new threshold of 45,000 valid signatures for upstart state parties to gain ballot access. Proud contends no one in the Republican Party knows how the copies became integrated with original signatures, but that their inclusion was inadvertent. She said hundreds of volunteers across the state collected signatures, handed them off to other volunteers and then dropped them off at various locations including GOP headquarters in Albany, where signatures were \"being collected and dropped off up until minutes before the filing deadline.\"  Proud confirmed signatures were bound into volumes at Republican headquarters in Albany, where she said more than 20 volunteers, interns and staff were \"frantically pulling together the hundreds of pages of signatures\" at the last minute. They were \"hole-punching and binding, rushing to get them in before it was too late.\" \"Whether for record-keeping or data entry purposes, it is a very common procedure for copies to be made of petitions by campaigns and even individuals who gather signatures,\" Proud said. \"The process was chaotic and as a result, copies of the valid signatures were inadvertently included in the filing. The mistake was acknowledged and the [Board of Elections] decision to rule the petitions invalid was accepted with no further action taken.\" Proud did not answer a question about which specific people were involved in binding the petitions at GOP headquarters. The incident has also fueled political fallout, with Gov. Kathy Hochul's campaign issuing a statement last week claiming, \"Lee Zeldin is now implicated in an actual case of alleged election fraud, and this time it's real. New Yorkers deserve to know how more than 11,000 photocopied petition signatures were submitted on behalf of Zeldin’s campaign and who oversaw the process.\" In July, the state Board of Elections found that more than 12,800 signatures submitted were invalid, including more than 11,000 that had been photocopied. With about 39,000 remaining, Zeldin and other statewide Republicans fell roughly 6,000 short of gaining an Independence Party ballot line, which in the past has helped sway certain close elections for GOP candidates. Democratic state Sen. Zellnor Myrie, chair of the Senate's Elections Committee, recently wrote a letter asking Albany County District Attorney David Soares to investigate the Independence Party petitioning effort. (Late last week Soares' office said they had still not received a copy, though it was provided to media outlets.) \"It is clear the Zeldin campaign perpetrated a fraud,\" Myrie alleged. \"Pages of valid signatures were photocopied. Thereafter, the original sheets were paginated, as were the photocopied pages. These sheets were assigned different page numbers in order to create the appearance that the pages contained separate, valid signatures. ... What is unknown and must be investigated by your office is who committed these criminal acts.\" Soares' office said they're reviewing the matter. Other election experts told the Times Union that photocopying petition signatures would be so easily detectable upon close examination that it’s difficult to conceive the act was intentional. Indeed, the 11,000 xeroxed signatures were quickly flagged by a rival political party. The more than 900 photocopied pages were all placed within the final 10 of the 47 volumes submitted.  The Times Union could locate only one volume out of 47 with signatures obtained on May 31, the submission deadline date, when Proud said signatures were still being delivered to party headquarters. Those were gathered in the Syracuse area, transported to Albany the same day, then bound in a volume of 151 overall pages, presumably at the Republican headquarters. In that volume — No. 40 — there were 14 pages of signatures gathered May 31. There were also 75 photocopied pages included near the end of the volume. Citing the chaos of the process, Proud said the GOP could not say for certain whether the volumes containing copies were assembled at GOP headquarters. She did not know where else volumes might have been bound besides that office, however, and confirmed that petition volumes are typically bound in a single location. The Libertarian Party, another minor political party in New York, flagged the problematic Independence Party petition signatures in June and documented the issues on a website called ZeldinCopies.com.  Since different numbers were written at the bottom of xeroxed sheets than on the originals, the website argues, the photocopying must have occurred before the numbering, and the individual petition sheets must have been received in a single place. Zeldin’s campaign manager, Eric Amidon, is listed on the 47 petition volume cover sheets as the contact person for any petition deficiencies. He signed each of them.  In the campaign’s defense, Amidon has noted that the Zeldin campaign does not own a photocopy machine.  But the state Republican Party does make a monthly payment to rent a Xerox copier, according to federal campaign filings. 'Specialist Consulting' At the same time the troubled effort was playing out, a well-known petitioning expert was working as a paid consultant for the state Republican Party, records show. John Haggerty, a longtime operative in New York Republican politics, also has a fraught legal history involving the state Independence Party. He led former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s petitioning in 2005, but ran into serious problems working for Bloomberg’s 2009 campaign. Before that fall's election, the billionaire candidate gave more than $1 million to the Independence Party, which was supposed go to an Election Day poll-watching operation run by Haggerty. But Haggerty was later charged with pocketing much of Bloomberg’s money and using it to buy a home in Queens. In 2011, Haggerty was convicted of second-degree grand larceny and second-degree money laundering, sentenced to one to four years in prison. On Oct. 14, 2021, a limited liability company called “Specialist Consulting” was incorporated in New York, and two days later began receiving $10,000 monthly payments from NY Republican Federal Campaign Committee, which is controlled by state Republican Party Chairman Nick Langworthy, a longtime Haggerty ally. The company, which is owned by Haggerty, has been paid $13,000 a month since April and also was paid $7,500 this year by the state GOP’s party housekeeping account. Proud declined to comment on Haggerty’s role within the state Republican Party or whether he was involved in the petitioning efforts.  In July, Zeldin’s campaign said if there was an error with the petitions, it was due to the workload handled by volunteers.  Proud said that Hochul and \"people who hate the Republican Party are working overtime trying to spin this into something it's not to distract from the very real corruption of the pay-to-play scandals that are going on inside her office.\" Hochul's campaign has contrasted the tainted petitioning with Zeldin’s votes in the U.S. House of Representatives on Jan. 6, 2021, objecting to the certification of the 2020 U.S. presidential election. Zeldin, a congressman from Long Island, took those votes amid unproven allegations from Republicans that widespread voter fraud had allowed Joe Biden to defeat Donald J. Trump. Explaining his votes that evening, Zeldin said: \"Americans deserve nothing less than full faith and confidence in their election.\" Brendan J. Lyons contributed reporting."
<https://www.timesunion.com/state/article/Troubled-petitions-were-assembled-at-NY-17372685.php?IPID=Times-Union-realestate-article-ribbon>