Big turnout in mayor’s race already

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Seven candidates for Buffalo mayor last week filed nominating petitions bearing the signatures of nearly 27,000 city voters.

That’s more voters than took part in the 2013 and 2021 Democratic primaries for mayor. It’s nearly as many as cast valid ballots in 2005 and 2017.

Acting Mayor Chris Scanlon led the pack with a whopping 7,565 signatures, nearly four times the number needed to qualify for the ballot.

Garnell Whitfield, the former fire commissioner, filed the second-highest number of signatures, with 4,315.

University District Council Member Rasheed Wyatt had more than 3,800 signatures, according to The Buffalo News.

State Sen. Sean Ryan, who has the Democratic Party endorsement, turned in 3,605 signatures.

Michael Gainer, founder of Buffalo ReUse and ReUse Action, had about 3,000 signatures, and educator James Payne had about 2,500.

Those are all Democrats, who needed the signatures of 2,000 city Democrats to qualify for the June 24 primary ballot. The lone Republican, attorney James Gardner, filed about 1,100 signatures, according to The News. He didn’t need as many as the Democrats did, because there aren’t as many registered Republicans in the city.

In fact, it’s likely more than 27,000 voters have taken an affirmative role in this election, two and half months before the primary. Anthony Tyson-Thompson — a former communications director for Assembly Majority Leader Crystal Peoples-Stokes who joined the race late — didn’t tell The News or Investigative Post how many signatures he turned in. But presumably he gathered at least the minimum 2,000 or wouldn’t have bothered to file.

So call it 29,000 voters who have weighed in so far.

The highest turnout for a mayoral primary in the past 20 years was in 2009, when the contest between then South District Council Member Mickey Kearns and former Mayor Byron Brown drew more than 41,000 Democrats to the polls. The lowest turnout in the Brown era was 2013, when fewer than 23,000 voters cast ballots.

All the Democrats except Scanlon and Payne face challenges to the validity of their petitions. Objectors — who are generally proxies for competing candidates or party factions —have three days from the time a petition is filed to make general objections, then another six days to specify what those objections are. The county elections commissioners, one Democrat and one Republican, rule on the objections and decide how many good signatures each candidate has left. There are a host of reason signatures, or even whole pages of them, can be disqualified. Sometimes the parties go to court and ask a judge to decide.

Eight parties filed general objections to Wyatt’s petition, five to Gainer’s, two each to Whitfield’s and Tyson-Thompson’s, according to a log published by the Erie County Board of Elections. One person challenged Ryan’s. Nobody has challenged the petition of Gardner, the Republican.

What I’m reading

— Election law specialist Jerry Goldfeder in an essay last week described New York’s ballot access laws as “so, well, 19th century.” The onerous, antiquated process persists largely “to give political adversaries the opportunity to knock [each other] off the ballot in time-consuming and costly litigation,” he wrote. Would-be candidates should just have to pay a filing fee, according to Goldfeder.

— The Buffalo News editorial board opines that Acting Mayor Chris Scanlon’s plan to sell city-owned parking ramps is “yet another one-time fix” to the city’s chronically imbalanced budgets.

— The News’s Dale Anderson reports that the Trump administration has cut off $3.5 million in provisions to Feed More WNY, which supplies food pantries and soup kitchens throughout the region.

— The Town of Tonawanda officially charged dozens of its police officers with conducting an illegal work slowdown, The News’s Steve Watson reports.

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