“When a candidate who is not a member of the WFP wants to run on the WFP line, election law requires that candidate to obtain the party’s authorization (commonly called a ‘Wilson Pakula’), explained Party spokesman Dan Levitan. “Under the WFP rules, either the State Committee or the State Executive Committee of the Party may grant this authorization. People generally understand this authorization to be the WFP ‘endorsement.’”
While both the WFO Coordinating Council rules and the Party rules filed with the State Board of Elections agree that a two-thirds vote is enough to give citywide candidates the Party endorsement, and along with it, the nomination onto the Party ballot line, a New York State Court of Appeals unanimous decision in the matter of Conroy v. State Committee of Independence Party of N.Y. from June 2008 ruled against this approach.
Robert Conroy, the Brooklyn chair of the Independence Party, was among those who objected to an effort by the Independence Party’s state committee to pull power away from the county chairs by claiming the superseding right to determine which candidates were granted the Wilson-Pakula exemption allowing non-party members to run on the party line. Had this been possible, for example, Michael Bloomberg might have only needed to appeal to the GOP state executive committee instead of the five Republican county chairs to get on their ballot line this fall.
The Court allowed the state committee to determine ballot lines for local races. There was nothing stopping that under the law. However, the Court added, “The statute contains only one exception to this rule: where a ‘designation or nomination is for an office to be filled by all the voters of the city of New York.’ In such a case, the ‘authorization must be by a majority vote of those present at a joint meeting of the executive committees of each of the county committees of the party within the city of New York.’”
The argument made by the state Independence Party that it lacked five county chairs, and therefore could not comply with this rule, was not convincing to the Court of Appeals.
The election law cited takes precedence over party rules, as does the court decision. Therefore, leaving aside the questions raised by the Organization determining who received the Party line, if someone had challenged the nominations of Bill Thompson, Bill de Blasio and John Liu in court, precedent suggests that the two-thirds votes which put these three candidates on the Party line for the November ballot might have been invalidated by the courts. (This would not have effected their endorsements by the Democratic Party.)
A person named Yun Fui Xiao did file general objections to all three candidates’ WFP petitions, but for the matter to have reached the courts, someone would have needed to file specific objections to the candidates’ WFP petitions with the city Board of Elections and bring them to court.
No one ever did.
