NEW SCOTLAND — The district attorney’s office cleared New Scotland petitioners and the Albany County Board of Elections of fraud allegations raised by Sharon Boehlke, a New Scotland Conservative, and County Conservative Party Chairman Richard Stack.
"No crimes were found," spokesman Richard Arthur stated in an e-mail to The Enterprise. "In this case, we found an honest mistake."

Boehlke had submitted petitions to the board of elections to allow write-in voting in the upcoming primary for the Conservative Party.

When Stack challenged the petitions, noting re-written dates, Boehlke responded, in an Enterprise article, that she hadn’t made the changes; she stated they must have been made after she handed in the petitions to the board of elections.

Copies of the petitions were reviewed and individual signers were interviewed, Arthur told The Enterprise.
"We found time-stamped copies of the petitions, which showed that the change had been made prior to the time when the petitions were submitted to the BOE [Board of Elections]," Arthur wrote.

The signers themselves made changes to the dates, said a member of the district attorney’s Public Integrity Unit who requested that his name be withheld.

The investigator spoke with a few of the signers, with Boehlke who handed in the petition, and with a witness other than Boehlke who watched family members sign, he said. These interviews resulted in a reasonable explanation, he said.

The witness had not signed the petition because he is not enrolled in the Conservative Party, the investigator said.

The witness watched his family members sign and date their lines and then he realized it was the wrong date and he wrote over the date again to put in the correct date, the investigator reported.
"It was a clerical error....no fraud," the investigator said.

But the new date had not been initialed, so the county board of elections had made the right decision to strike those lines from the petitions, the investigator said.

While this one witness explained why a cluster of family members had the wrong date, The Enterprise asked him about the other line, line 7, where the date also appears to have been altered and was struck from the petition by the election commissioners.

The district attorney’s investigator said that he did not interview that signer.. He said that if the Public Integrity Unit had unlimited resources then absolutely he would have interviewed everyone, but, in this case, he didn’t need to.

The date changes were mistakes, he said, nothing devious was going on.
This case was "clear cut," he said.
He appreciated Stack’s objection, because it "did need to be looked into," he said.
"I’m really excited it worked out," the investigator said. "The system worked."