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D.I.D. did not help our slate in the 65th A.D.

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BY GEORGETTE FLEISCHER  |  Caveat petitor (candidate beware).

The Villager’s Sept. 11 front-page article “Cude and Gault win big in district leader election” — which features a triumphalist Sean Sweeney as leader of the “powerful” Downtown Independent Democrats club — needs a sober corrective.

I was one of 10 candidates asked to run on the D.I.D. reform slate in the 65th Assembly District, for judicial delegate or judicial delegate alternate. All 10 of us lost. My understanding is that this result is not something that has happened before; in short, never has a coalition of indicted former Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver’s Truman Democratic Club, the United Democratic Organization and the Lower East Side Democrats swept all 10 delegate positions. What happened?

Unlike the D.I.D. palm card, the U.D.O. palm card, above, was printed in Chinese, Spanish and English.
Unlike the D.I.D. palm card, the U.D.O. palm card, above, was printed in Chinese, Spanish and English.

Nothing. That is, D.I.D. did nothing to help me, or as far as I know, any of the other 10 candidates who would have been tasked with selecting Supreme Court justices, after D.I.D. asked us to run on its reform slate, in my case, in order “to help out.”

Sweeney stated he would be mailing out a campaign flier on our behalf a week before the election; I know of only two voters in my election district who got one, one of whom is myself. Realizing a couple of days before the election that no one in our area had any idea an election was happening, let alone what the issues were, I and another candidate scrambled to do something on our own in our respective election districts.

I am grateful to the voters who came out in pouring rain, and who made the count remarkably close at my polling site, the DeSoto School, at 143 Baxter St. (our slate lost 201 to 199, for judicial delegate; and 209 to 199, for alternate), even though I was able to put in only a few hours of campaigning around my heavy teaching schedule.

Had the election been based on my election district alone, the vote would have been evenly split, with five of our reform delegates/alternates winning election, plus five from the other slate. But, the numbers across all 96 election districts were devastating: We lost by 5,862 to 4,073, with 52 write-ins, for judicial delegate; and 5,806 to 3,520, with 34 write-ins, for alternate.

The upshot? Judy Rapfogel, Assemblymember Silver’s longtime chief of staff and wife of William Rapfogel, currently in prison for multimillion-dollar theft from the Metropolitan Council on Jewish Poverty, will be selecting our Supreme Court justices. She won election to the final slot by 50 votes.

Based on figures I have, the 65th A.D. is 43 percent Asian and 15 percent Hispanic. Yet D.I.D.’s sole piece of campaign literature was not even translated into Chinese or Spanish. In a post-election e-mail blast based on The Villager’s article, “Election Results: Soho Romps!” Sweeney called D.I.D. “the Soho Alliance’s political wing,” and the “ ‘official’ Democratic club for the district” — I guess that would be the 66th A.D.

If D.I.D., whose executives live in luxury lofts and condos in Soho and Noho, condescends to engage with the Lower East Side and Chinatown for politics, should it not have the decency to address those heavily immigrant, public housing and other rent-regulated constituents in language they understand?

Moreover, does a political club not owe something to the candidates that it asks to put their names, their reputations and their aspirations for fair elections and corruption-free government on the line? How about a readable flier and a campaign plan?