‘I Tried to Think Like a Corrupt Party Hack’

This, and several hundred other examples of DNC NOT doing what is right and best for "we the people" explain why so many of us are Independent. Maybe it is time for ALL OF US to not declare party and claim independence...

Terrific reporting. Thank you for grinding through this, and applying such sound reasoning to your search.

Uptown there is the defunct Tioga Dem Club. At on time this club had a storefront space, and was the Manhattan party leader Denny Farrell's club. How did a defunct club get to nominate the District Leader and now Assembly Member Al Taylor? There are 2 old times of this club who attend local meetings and when you ask them how many members of their club and where do they meet you can't get an answer. They even have a defunct website - http://manhattandemocrats.org/about/manhattan-democratic-clubs/

Follow the District Leaders who end up with jobs in city govt too with no experience. What does our City Comptroller Scott Stringer have to say about this? Right now he's employed a DL from East Harlem who has no background in finance, but is connected to the party boss. Mr. Stringer should tell us also how she ended up on the community board.

It's pretty much the same in the Southern States GOP.

Go to Westchester and you will find the same issue. This is what happens when the party boss is also the head of the Board of Elections.

Did the reporter call the Committee Chair, Joe Crowley? What is his role in this?

The Time is very late to the party on this one. This isn't news, it's been going on for as long as anyone can remember. A few years back I worked at the Democratic Party of Brooklyn. I could tell which assembly districts were full of fake county committee members because I had hard copies of the voter rolls, which the Board of Elections publishes. In some districts, all the committee members' names were the names with a lot of white space surrounding them on the page, like someone was flipping through the voter rolls and picking the first name that jumped out at them. Yes, it really was that simple. And it's not a secret. It just doesn't get discussed. In Brooklyn, we have proxy voting, where someone can sign their vote over to someone else instead of attending the county committee meeting. The people who are electing county committee members without their knowledge are also signing fraudulent proxies on their behalf. When the organizers behind the fraudulent candidacies use those proxies to decide who wins the ballot line in a special election or who is the chairman of the county committee, they are committing election fraud. Your bio says you've been writing about NYC for over 20 years. Well, now you finally know how this city is run.

This isn't news. I used to work at the Democratic Party of Brooklyn. I could tell which districts were full of fake county committee members because I had hard copies of the voter rolls, which the Board of Elections publishes. In some districts, all the committee members' names had a lot of white space surrounding them, like someone was flipping through the voter rolls and picking the first name that jumped out at them. Yes, it really was that simple. And it's not a secret. It just doesn't get discussed. In Brooklyn, we have proxy voting, where someone can sign their vote over to another voter instead of attending the county committee meeting. The people who are electing county committee members without their knowledge are also signing fraudulent proxies on their behalf. When the organizers behind the fraudulent candidacies use those proxies to decide who wins the ballot line in a special election or who is the chairman of the county committee, they are committing election fraud. Your bio says you've been writing about NYC for over 20 years. Well, now you finally know how this city is run.

Wow. Get those hacks out!

Great investigative work! The way you found these people makes so much sense and shows how much the party machine still relies on old corrupt tricks.

So Democrats rig elections? Who would have guessed. Despicable.

Will there be a follow up article to this? Thanks.

It's funny and scary. Great scoop.

Is anyone surprised? And this is the apparently "progressive" party in a supposedly "enlightened" state. Democracy, when manipulated just right, is the perfect dictatorship.

This is the same Democratic political machine which elects Chuck Schumer, Jerry Nadler and Mayor Di Blasio. Mr. Newman, your next assignment is to find out how many people with dementia are voting with absentee ballots? I would love to compare the list of NY State voters with NY State Income Tax Returns. In theory, every NY State voters should be filing a NY State Tax Return.

Thank goodness you've exposed this corruption. Surely now the borough's Democratic leaders will come together in glorious harmony and do...nothing. The borough's Republican leaders will...also do nothing, but that's because they're either deceased or living at Del Boca Vista these days. And then we'll all go back to puzzling over how somebody like Trump could ever have emerged as a plausible leader.

Someone needs to reassure the elderly that they aren't on the hook for hundeds in filing fees. But that might not be the case!

It saddens me to be confronted by what I know must be true: the Democratic machine is alive and well in NYC and as corrupt as all political machines. Note that I write 'saddens' and not 'surprises.' I do think that the Dems are not as willing to stoop as low as the Republicans did, especially in our last national election. I still think that fewer Dems are willing to spout what they know are lies, unlike many of their opponents in the last election. However, that is damning with faint praise: our political system is broken...that is, if it was ever whole. I don't know the answers, especially in these days of 24 hour instant news with even the NYT caught up in the rush to report without proper fact-checking, and with so many of its current stories tinged with the biased words of the reporter. I don't know how to fix it but I'm hoping that someone does, for the sake of us all. If not, we may well slide into the hellhole of fascism, where the strongest people feel it's necessary to trample on the truth and on people who get in the way. From there, it's a very short road to controlling us all for the good of the group in power. Does this sound a bit Cassandra-like? I for one hope that I am very wrong.

Best quote of the article. I laughed out loud. A few names down the list, Kathleen Dunphy, 81, picked up the phone. “I’m not running for anything,” she said. “I’m running for my life.”