A Candidate Should Never Collect their Own Signatures
William Wagstaff
By Dan Murphy
A lawsuit has been filed against William Wagstaff, a candidate for Westchester County District Attorney, alleging election fraud in the submission of his petitions. The lawsuit alleges that Wagstaff himself improperly witnessed signatures for petitions that were collected and witnessed by someone else, in this primary election cycle.
“The Subject Designating Petitions must be invalidated due to fraud, in that the candidate personally signed and filed at least one false subscribing witness statement attesting to having witnessed signatures that he, in fact, did not witness,” states the lawsuit, filed by former State Supreme Court Judge J. Emmett Murphy.
The serious nature of the charges against Wagstaff are based on the office that he is running for, Westchester DA, the top law enforcement official in the County, and the fact that as a licensed attorney in New York State, any petition that Wagstaff attested to that was false, or fraudulent, may affect his law license.
Private Investigators working on the case interviewed three people who signed a petition with Wagstaff’s name at the bottom. But each person said that Wagstaff had not collected their signature.
“WILLIAM O. WAGSTAFF III’s witness statement on Page 13 of Volume 4 of the Wagstaff Democratic Designating Petition contains a materially false statement because signatures appearing on that page were not subscribed by the signers thereto in his presence.”
Wagstaff took an unnecessary risk, and made an unforced error, by collecting signatures for his own campaign.
Murphy is asking the court to invalidate Wagstaff’s petitions because of a material error, that the candidate forged a petition for their own candidacy. If a supporter of Wagstaff had made the same mistake and signed the bottom of petitions without witnessing them, only those petitions would be invalidated.
And the lawsuit references NY case law that invalidated petitions with the same type of error. “[A] designating petition may . . . be invalidated when there is a finding that the candidate has participated in or is chargeable with knowledge of fraud in procuring signatures for a designating petition, even if there is a sufficient number of valid signatures independent of those fraudulently procured” (Matter of Drace v Sayegh, 43 AD3d 481, 482 [2007]
And “It is well-settled that where the candidate acts as the subscribing witness to a petition sheet, a false statement with regard to even a single signature necessitates invalidation of the entire designating petition (see Matter of Haskell v Gargiulo, 51 NY2d 747, 748 [1980]
Many in the legal community believe that Wagstaff’s campaign for DA is in jeopardy. Wagstaff and two other democrats, Susan Cacace and Adeel Mirza, are looking to get on the ballot for a democratic primary on June 25 for DA.
The Wagstaff campaign held a rally on April 15 outside the county courthouse in White Plains to “denounce” what the Wagstaff campaign called “DA candidate Susan Cacace’s voter disenfranchisement efforts.
In an advisory, the Wagstaff campaign writes, “Voters, community activists and civil rights advocates and organizations, including Black Westchester Magazine, the Westchester Alliance for Police Reform, and Save Mount Vernon, will join in a “Rally for Justice” press conference at the Westchester County Courthouse to denounce voter intimidation, harassment, and disenfranchisement of Black communities by Susan Cacace’s campaign for Westchester District Attorney.
“During the routine and legitimate petition review process, the Wagstaff campaign was notified by multiple voters of threats received by an “investigator” – including three Black women who will be speaking at the conference – who signed petitions in support of Democratic candidate William Wagstaff’s candidacy.”
The lawsuit includes video evidence of voters speaking to private investigators about the petitions without intimidation. The rally included some of the same voters, “telling their stories of being menaced, intimidated, and threatened by investigators hired by Cacace to question the validity of the petitions they signed.”
Speakers at the rally included Mount Vernon Mayor Shawyn Patterson-Howard, who supported Wagstaff and, along with several other speakers, alleged that the Cacace campaign is trying to disenfranchise the black community.
But the Cacace campaign is doing what almost every campaign in Westchester and New York State does. That is, to review the petitions of your political opponent.
In fact, the Wagstaff campaign highlighted the fact that they were reviewing Cacace’s signatures. In the end Cacace’s petitions appear to be in order.
Mayor Patterson Howard used the same strategy to knock off one of her opponents. In 2021, Patterson-Howard challenged the petitions of former Mayor Richard Thomas, and Thomas was knocked off the ballot.
And in this election cycle, former Congressman Mondaire Jones’ campaign challenged the petitions of his opponent, MaryAnn Carr, and her removed from the ballot.
Assemblymembers Dana Levenberg and Chris Burdick also successfully challenged the petitions of their opponents, which points to how frequently this happens in every election cycle.
The case will be assigned a Judge on April 15, in Westchester County Court. A decision should be reached in two weeks.
