Alayeto, the only Bronx-based candidate who aims to secure the City Council seat representing East Harlem and the South Bronx, is officially on the ballot for the Democratic primaries, judges ruled on Wednesday.
Community Board 1 Chair Clarisa Alayeto, who is running for the local City Council seat. (Photo courtesy of DREAM/X.)
A version of this story was originally published by the Mott Haven Herald, a student-powered news outlet at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism covering the Bronx neighborhoods of Mott Haven, Melrose and Port Morris.
Clarisa M. Alayeto, the only Bronx-based candidate who aims to secure the City Council seat representing East Harlem and the South Bronx, is officially on the ballot for the Democratic primaries, judges ruled on Wednesday.
The Mott Haven Herald previously reported Alayeto’s legal challenges in securing her ballot spot after an April 28 decision from the state Supreme Court upheld her removal from the primaries. Now Alayeto, who chairs Bronx Community Board 1 and co-chairs the NYC Public Health Advisory Council, has won a complicated legal battle to defend her candidacy. So far, she has secured the most campaign donations from Bronxites in the highly competitive race.
Alayeto did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Since filing her petition with the New York City Board of Elections on April 2 to be in the June primaries, Alayeto encountered trouble. Her lawyer, Jorge Luis Vasquez, first submitted a cover letter with the incorrect zip code of her residence.
Vasquez rectified the error by submitting a new cover letter after the Board of Elections prompted him to do so, but there was yet another mistake: her name was misspelled as “Claris” instead of “Clarisa.” The BOE disqualified Alayeto from the race on April 11 given that “the amended cover sheet had errors not present in the original filing.” Soon after, several legal challenges ensued.
The Appellate Division ruled against an April 28 decision by Judge Jeffrey H. Pearlman, who had rejected Alayeto’s attempts to overturn the BOE’s decision and her claims that the objections from members of the Ending Homelessness and Building a Better NYC PAC (EHBB) “lack standing.”
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Notably, given the central role typographical errors appeared to play in Alayeto’s disqualification, Pearlman’s written decision to keep her off the ballot was riddled with misspellings of her last name as “Aleyto” instead of “Alayeto.”
The Appellate Division judges sided with Alayeto on Wednesday and rejected the BOE’s grounds for removing her from the ballot in the first place. They noted the cover letter’s errors were not “fatal defects” but rather a “scrivener’s error“—the sheet itself “substantially complied with the Election Law.”
Alayeto’s back-and-forth with the BOE and elections commissioners for the City of New York only grew more complicated when the Wall Street-backed political action committee, Ending Homelessness and Building a Better NYC, entered the fray.
Tomás Ramos, the PAC’s founder and CEO, first filed objections on April 7 against Alayeto and four other candidates in the District 8 race: Elsie Encarnacion, Nicholas Reyes, Raymond Santana and Federico Colon.
The PAC endorses Wilfredo López, one of Alayeto’s competitors, and has spent $145,143 in digital ads and mailers for his campaign. It also endorses four other City Council candidates across the city. It has not yet filed any objections outside of District 8, the BOE’s objection ledger shows.
“In the course of Ending Homelessness and Building a Better NYC’s standard review of petition submissions to the Board of Elections, we found various instances of filing irregularities that do not abide by election law and in some cases align with serious allegations of election fraud,” wrote Michael Brady, spokesperson for the group, in an emailed statement. “This is about protecting the integrity of our elections—not just for this race, but for every race moving forward.”
The latest ruling from the Appellate Division noted that EHBB members “did not comply with Election Law” while filing the specifications of their objections and that the Supreme Court “erred in dismissing” Alayeto’s petition after she did not mention the PAC as respondents in her previous appeal to reinstate her name on the primary ballot.
The PAC’s allegations against Alayeto include that her campaign collected invalid signatures for her petition to be on the ballot. The PAC made similar allegations against other District 8 candidates, including Nicholas Reyes and Federico Colon. No objections have been filed against López, according to a BOE objection ledger.
Reyes, an East-Harlem native vying for the City Council seat, said the legal challenges set by the PAC have been troubling.
“I want to say to all the candidates who are going through this—listen, hold your head up and we’re going to do this together,” said Reyes. “Some of the actions that have transpired towards my campaign through legal actions have been downright evil, in my opinion, and that’s something we cannot have—we cannot have an elected official that’s willing to go that far.”
EHBB’s challenges against Alayeto and the four other District 8 candidates have not been successful, THE CITY reported.
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