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The Journal News

State Board of Elections investigating year-old New Square voting irregularity

By SARAH NETTER

THE JOURNAL NEWS

(Original publication: October 5, 2006)

The state Board of Elections is investigating a complaint from the 2005 election after a poll watcher said he saw election workers give gift cards to New Square voters.

Michael Castelluccio, a member of the Preserve Ramapo political party and the editor of its Web site, made the initial complaint last month to the Rockland Board of Elections.

Rockland Elections Commissioner Joan Silvestri said the information was forwarded to the state soon after, as the county had no authority to launch an investigation.

"All I can say is that it is a violation of election law to offer any ... compensation for people to go vote," she said.

Castelluccio's complaint came after party poll watcher Alan Schwartz told him he was observing the voting process at a New Square polling location last year when he saw the cards being doled out by election workers.

"All of a sudden I see some of the women ask the people behind the table, 'Where's my card?' " he said, adding that some people got the card without asking for it.

Schwartz was given one of the cards, written in Yiddish, by an election worker. It thanks residents for voting and instructs the children of the voter to redeem the card at school for a gift. The gift is not specified.

Schwartz and Castelluccio said they were prompted to go to the Board of Elections — even though nearly a year had passed — because of other, more recent, investigations into possible voter coercion and compensation.

The District Attorney's Office and the state Board of Elections are investigating an advertisement placed in Community Connections, a weekly Monsey newspaper that promised free ice-cream machines to the first 2,000 Monsey residents who voted in the Sept. 12 primary.

The Sheriff's Department was sent that day to the Northern Metropolitan Nursing Home in Monsey to stop people from distributing sign up sheets for the ice-cream machines outside the building.

In August, the Board of Elections learned that residents of the New Monsey Park Home for Adults had accused Yizchok "Yitzy" Ullman, the home's administrator, of threatening them to vote for Democratic candidates or face loss of television privileges.

"It's unusual to have this many complaints," Silvestri said. "I think, in many cases, folks are trying to engage people to go and vote" without realizing that any compensation violates election law.

Robert Brehm, deputy director of public information for the state Board of Elections, said there was a two-year statute of limitation between an incident and a complaint. The penalty for violating the section of the state's Election Law dealing with compensation for voting includes being found guilty of a felony.

Rabbi Michael Dick of the Monsey Jewish Center said he found the concerns over the ice-cream maker and gift cards to be exaggerated.

"This is pretty minor stuff," he said.

"It's not buying a vote here," he said. "They're just saying, 'Please come.' "

Dick said he realized election law forbade the compensation, but Jewish voters in Monsey and New Square were passionate about elections, supporting the candidate they believe are sympathetic to Israel and who support the voters' values.

The community has been the target of criticism for its longtime practice of forming a bloc vote to support one candidate in any particular race. But Dick likened the bloc vote to the organized support of unions or other cultural groups.

The outside community, he said, should not use the recent elections investigations to target the entire bloc.