Queens DA Vote Will Head To Recount Amid Legal Challenge

QUEENS, NY — The Democratic primary for Queens district attorney is heading to a recount as the legal teams for top-two candidates Melinda Katz and Tiffany Cabán prepare for a court battle over the fate of roughly 100 affidavit ballots.

The NYC Board of Elections will start its manual recount of some 90,000 ballots cast in the dramatic primary race as early as Tuesday, July 9, triggered by Katz's lead of less than 0.5 percent of the vote.

The recount could add as many as 400 votes to the final tally, because the machines that scan votes only count ballots that are bubbled-in, when some voters mistakenly circle a candidate's name or write a checkmark, according to Cabán's campaign.

That same day, lawyers for Katz and Cabán will head to Queens County Supreme Court in Jamaica for their first appearance in a lawsuit over 114 affidavit ballots that weren't counted because voters failed to write down their party affiliation.

Katz, the Queens borough president and party favorite, led Cabán by 20 votes Wednesday, after election commissioners finished a daylong count of absentee and affidavit ballots cast in the June 25 primary.

Katz's narrow lead shrunk even further to 16 on Friday, when election commissioners added six previously invalidated affidavit ballots to the vote count.

Before that, Cabán led Katz by 1,199 votes.

Affidavit ballots are provisional votes cast when voters encounter an issue with their registration at the polls. Voters fill out their ballot and an affidavit oath form, which asks voters their reason for using an affidavit ballot, their party enrollment and other personal information.

Staffers for the NYC Board of Elections say affidavit ballots don't count if voters fail to write their party affiliation, prompting them to invalidate 114 ballots cast in the primary.

Cabán's lawyers will argue before Judge Jeremy Weinstein that those ballots should count.

Two such voters were at the elections board's Forest Hills office Friday as Renée Paradis, a lawyer for Cabán's campaign, presented 20 affidavit ballots with the party affiliation box left blank that she argued should be counted.

Elmhurst resident Joseph Moore, 42, said he felt angry that his vote may not count. Moore moved to Queens just over a month ago from Harlem.

"I thought I had filled out the ballot correctly," he told Patch, adding that polls workers looked over his ballot and said nothing about the party affiliation box he'd missed.

"You're looking at this densely populated, poorly-designed form."