Rep. Lee Zeldin made a national name for himself by fanning unfounded and false claims of election fraud in the 2020 presidential election. But in his race for governor, he may now be a perpetrator of fraud after the Libertarian Party claimed that his campaign photocopied petition signatures.
The Zeldin campaign recently submitted petitions to appear on the Independence Party line, a now-defunct third party that lost its automatic ballot access following the 2020 election. For that reason, it needed to go through the independent petitioning process of gathering 45,000 signatures across the state. A cursory review of the filing passed muster, but Andrew Kolstee, secretary of the Libertarian Party (which also lost its ballot access in 2020) filed an objection, alleging that over 11,000 of the submitted signatures were photocopies of other pages.
On Monday, the state Board of Elections determined that nearly 13,000 of the 52,000 signatures filed for Zeldin, as well as the rest of the Republican statewide slate, were invalid. That left about 39,000 signatures remaining, well short of the 45,000 signature requirement.
A spokesperson for the state Board of Elections said she couldn’t comment on pending litigation and could not confirm whether the bulk of those invalid signatures were fraudulently photocopied. But a review of the specific objections Kolstee filed and the findings of the board’s staff review of the signatures lend credence to the allegation. Staff found page...
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