Clarisa Alayeto, who is running to replace term-limited Councilmember Diana Ayala in Mott Haven, East Harlem and Randall’s Island, won her appeal to remain on the Democratic primary ballot next month.
It’s a big win for the first-time candidate against a big-money special interest group that brought the legal challenge to try to kick her off the primary lineup.
The New York City’s Board of Elections removed her from the ballot on April 11, citing clerical errors that included the misspelling of her name and an incorrect home address. That came after an independent expenditure group, Ending Homelessness & Building a Better NYC, challenged her petitions.
As previously reported by THE CITY, the group is bankrolled by an independent expenditure backed by big bucks from a Wall Street mogul that is supporting one of her opponents, Wil López. The group is run by CEO Tomás Ramos, who also operates social services nonprofit Oyate Group.
It’s an unusual case where an IE group — the local equivalent of a Super PAC, which is by law not supposed to coordinate with the campaign they support — directly challenged a candidate in a city race. More typically, petition challenges to keep people off the ballot come from other candidates in a race.
The court’s decision keeps Alayeto, one of the fundraising frontrunners, in contention for a competitive seat after a New York Supreme Court judge initially ordered her to be removed from the ballot last month. It also shuts down an attempt by the IE group to neutralize an opponent through the petitioning process.
In order to be listed on the ballot for the primary elections on June 24, candidates running for City Council seats must have submitted petitions to the BOE with at least 450 signatures by midnight on April 3.
While Alayeto met the signature threshold, her lawyer Jorge Luis Vasquez submitted a cover letter as part of the petition that incorrectly listed her home zip code, according to court documents. Vasquez attempted to fix that error in an amended cover letter, but the new document misspelled her name as “Claris” instead of “Clarisa” and failed to print his name below his signature. Because of those mistakes, BOE determined on April 11 that Alayeto would not be on the ballot this year.
Four days later, Vasquez filed a petition in the New York Supreme Court challenging the BOE’s determination. First reported by the Mott Haven Herald, the court upheld that decision on April 28.
In his ruling, which itself misspelled Alayeto’s name as “Aleyto,” Judge Jeffrey H. Pearlman dismissed her appeal because the Mott Haven-based candidate failed to name the leaders of the special interest group who objected to her petitions as respondents. Alayeto argued that they failed to “meet the legal standard for intervention.”
Alayeto and Vasquez appealed Pearlman’s decision the same day. On Wednesday, they won that appeal after the Appellate Court found the “Supreme Court erred in dismissing the petition.”
The appellate judges wrote that the mistakes on the cover letters “were not fatal defects.”
“Rather, the defects in the cover sheet constituted a ‘scrivener’s error’ and the cover sheet substantially complied with the Election Law,” they wrote.
Neither Alayeto nor Ramos immediately responded to a request for comment.
“Ending Homelessness & Building a Better NYC takes the integrity of the election process very seriously,” EHBB spokesperson Michael Brady told THE CITY in a written statement, who noted the Appellate Court reversed the “correct decision.”
Four other candidates in the Mott Haven race received legal challenges through the BOE from EHHB, but none successfully knocked them off the ballot
Alayeto, who has chaired Bronx Community Board 1 since 2023 and is a former administrator at DREAM Charter School, has $129,738 in election funds on-hand, only trailing Ayala’s chief of staff Elsie Encarnacion by less than $30,000. On his own, López has $107,964 on hand in his campaign account.
But the IE backing him has many times that amount to spend.
EHHB is a six-month-old independent expenditure solely funded by $1.6 million from Wall Street financier Michael Jenkins. Up until last month, it had thrown its full weight behind López, a former legislative director for Councilmember Ben Kallos (D-Manhattan). Spending is capped at $228,000 for New York City Council races under the city’s matching funds program, but independent expenditure groups don’t have those limits.
Thus far, the group has spent at least $145,143 supporting López including a mass mailing, digital ads and swag as well as legal challenges to his opponents, according to its disclosure records.
It did not disclose its spending to the Campaign Finance Board for two months, Politico first reported, an omission it attributed to a clerical error. According to Politico, it’s also paid for not-yet-disclosed open bar events promoting him.
Meanwhile, longtime East Harlem resident Kaliris Salas also filed a complaint with the CFB regarding unreported spending on food distributions that placed literature promoting López’s campaign atop egg cartons.
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