NEW SCOTLAND — Republican candidates for town posts no longer have a lock on the Conservative Party line.

In the Sept. 13 primary, New Scotland voters enrolled in the Conservative Party will be able to write in the candidates of their choice not designated by the county party leaders for two council seats and the supervisor position. The county’s Conservative Party’s executive committee has endorsed candidates who are all also on the Republican ticket.

County Election Commissioner James Clancy said on Tuesday that he has accepted the petition for the opportunity to ballot in New Scotland’s Conservative Party primary, although some of the signatures were declared invalid.
"I’m very pleased," said Sharon Boehlke one of the petition organizers. "The right decision was made," she said; now the party nomination can "fairly go to the voters to decide who they want to go to ballot."

Boehlke has been critical of the Conservative Party’s policy that the executive board at the county level picks New Scotland candidates rather than local people who are more aware of the daily functioning of New Scotland town government.

Clancy and the other election commissioner, John Graziano, ruled that four signatures on Boehlke’s petition were invalid because the dates had been altered, Clancy said. However, since the petitioners had handed in 18 signatures, even with the four names removed, they still had more than the required nine signatures in order for write-ins to be permitted, he said.
"Election Law is very clean-cut," Clancy said; the commissioners didn’t need to investigate or make any phones calls.
"If anything is changed or crossed out and not initialed," which these did not have initials, then the signatures are invalid and thrown out, he said.

Albany County Conservative Party Chairman Richard Stack had challenged the petitions saying that five dates were illegally altered, and, as a result of the fraud, the entire petition should be voided.

Fraud"

Stack said he was pleased that the commissioners struck four of the five lines he was challenging, although he wished that they had thrown out the whole petition. Their ruling validates that there was fraud involved, Stack said.

He told The Enterprise this week, based on the commissioners’ position, he can now go to the Albany County District Attorney and ask him to investigate the alleged fraud.

He had called The Enterprise after a July 21 story on the petitions ran.
Stack said, based on Boehlke’s statement in the newspaper, "I plan on writing a letter to the D.A. to investigate the [her] allegation of fraud within the board of elections."

As of this Wednesday, Stack hadn’t yet sent a letter.

When Boehlke was interviewed for the July 21 issue, her reaction to her petition being challenged was one of surprise.

She said, when she submitted the petition to the board of elections, the dates were in no way unclear. She said she didn’t change the dates and that she watched each person sign and date their own names. If the dates appear to have been altered, she said, then the only possible explanation that she could fathom is that the papers had been changed after she handed them in.

Commissioner Clancy told The Enterprise this week, "That’s 100 percent incorrect....I’m very upset with her...That’s not how we operate."
"I hope anyone in the future, if they implicate us like that, they have proof....Her comment was uncalled-for," Clancy said.

Boehlke told The Enterprise this week that she did not mean it as an accusation. "I know I didn’t change them," she said. "If anything — it would have happened after," she said.

Stack said he’d like the district attorney to investigate the alleged fraud because then all Boehlke has to do to easily settle the situation is produce copies of her petition from before they where challenged. All experienced petitioners know to make a copy of a petition before handing it in, he said.
Richard Arthur, spokesperson for district attorney David Soares, said that if a significant credible allegation comes into the office, the evidence would be investigated. The district attorney’s office task is to investigate criminal acts and, he said, "many things don’t measure up to criminal acts."
"Election Law is very tough law," Arthur said. It’s not as straightforward as someone caught on tape selling crack cocaine to an undercover police officer, he said. "Voter fraud things are extremely hard...To prove criminality is difficult," Arthur said, but the department does take it seriously.

Arthur said he can’t make any comments about this particular allegation unless or until the office does receive a letter from Stack.

Moot point
Boehlke said that she saw the commissioners’ ruling as a "fair designation." Declaring the lines as invalid was a "matter of taking an eye ball look at it," she said. It was really a moot point, because, even if they struck her whole page of eight signatures, the petitioners together still had enough signatures to be allowed to write in, Boehlke said.

Because of this same point, Stack said it was not worth the Conservative Party’s time or money for lawyers to continue to challenge the petition in court.