A Democratic State Assembly candidate in Brooklyn submitted more than five thousand petition signatures to get on the primary ballot, and the New York City Board of Elections threw out ninety percent of them. Among the names on those petitions, the New York Post reported, were at least two voters who died more than a decade ago.
Marie Mirville-Shahzada, who is running for a seat stretching from Coney Island to Bay Ridge, collected 5,258 total signatures on her nominating petitions. The Board of Elections invalidated the vast majority. Some 3,000 of the people who supposedly signed lived outside the district or were not registered to vote. That left Mirville-Shahzada with just 479 valid signatures, 21 short of the 500 required to appear on the June 23 Democratic primary ballot.
The numbers alone are damning. But the details are worse.
The Post's own review of the petition forms turned up at least two signatures attributed to voters who, according to Social Security records, died in 2010. Both would be over 100 years old today. A third signature belonged to a woman whose family told the Post she was not in New York City on the day she allegedly signed.
That woman is 99-year-old Lucia Gelbfish. Her daughter, Sharon Gelbfish, told the Post that Lucia did not sign the petition. Sharon said her mother's "blood pressure would go through the roof" if she knew what had happened.
"I was a little incensed only because years ago you didn't hear things like this. This is our democracy nowadays. It's very sad."
Fresh ink went on these petitions last month, the Post reported. Whoever filled in those lines knew, or should have known, that the names did not belong to living, present voters in the district.
Chris McCreight, a fellow Democrat running against Mirville-Shahzada and the chief of staff to former City Councilman Justin Brannan, issued a statement calling the conduct a direct threat to public trust.
"This is why people lose faith in government, because you have people running for office who are willing to lie and cheat because they can't compete by following the rules. It's dead wrong and should not be tolerated when anybody, of any party, does it."
That last line, "of any party", is worth noting. McCreight is a Democrat criticizing a Democrat. The problem here is not partisan. It is procedural, and it is potentially criminal.
Cases like this are not isolated. Just across the Hudson, a former Democratic mayoral candidate in New Jersey admitted to forging 1,000 voter registration forms, a reminder that petition and registration fraud is a recurring vulnerability in the system, not a conspiracy theory.
Grace Rauh, executive director of Citizens Union, told the Post that while signatures get invalidated in races on a regular basis, the scale here is extraordinary.
"The fact that 90% of them have been invalidated is just a stunningly high number. This certainly strikes me as a case that merits additional investigation and some real scrutiny to see what was going on here. It's bewildering because it's so vast."
Alex Camarda, a senior policy adviser at Reinvent Albany, echoed that call. He told the Post the collective weight of the irregularities demands action.
"When you look at this collectively with all of these improprieties together, it certainly raises a lot of questions and should be investigated by the Board of Elections."
Yet the Board of Elections itself may not be the entity to deliver accountability. A BOE spokesperson told the Post that the board does not independently conduct investigations into fraudulent claims. The spokesperson also declined to say whether any potential investigation would be referred to the Brooklyn District Attorney's Office.
That silence should concern every voter in the district. If the board that validates, or invalidates, petitions has no mechanism to investigate the fraud it uncovers, the system has a gaping hole. Voters elsewhere have confronted similar problems. In North Carolina, a federal database check found 34,000 dead registrants still on the rolls, illustrating just how widespread the vulnerability is.
Kings County Supreme Court will now examine 34 of Mirville-Shahzada's 479 remaining valid signatures to determine whether any are forgeries. That is a narrow slice of a much larger problem. If the court throws out even a fraction of those 34, the candidate's already-insufficient total drops further.
Sources told the Post that Mirville-Shahzada filed paperwork to challenge the Board of Elections' decision to eliminate the signatures. She denied that her staff "would have done anything" improper and said they "knocked on every door." She told the Post she would provide an "official comment" later but did not respond to follow-up requests.
The district she seeks to represent has roughly 85,000 registered voters, with registered Democrats outnumbering Republicans by nearly two to one. There are about 19,000 registered Republicans. Republican Assemblyman Alec Brook-Krasny currently holds the seat and faces no challenges for the GOP nomination. The general election is set for November 3.
The political backdrop adds another layer. The Post noted that the district has been a battleground over a $3 billion Coney Island casino proposal, which former Councilman Brannan voted against. The stakes in this Assembly race are real, and so are the incentives to cut corners getting on the ballot.
Election integrity advocates have spent years warning about exactly this kind of breakdown. Polling consistently shows that Americans overwhelmingly support voter ID and stronger safeguards, even as many Democratic leaders resist those measures. Cases like this one explain why.
When 90 percent of a candidate's petition signatures are invalid, when dead voters' names appear on official forms, the problem is not a clerical hiccup. It is either systematic incompetence or deliberate misconduct. Neither answer is acceptable for someone seeking public office.
The Board of Elections caught the bad signatures. Credit where it is due. But catching them is not enough if no one investigates how they got there. The BOE's own spokesperson admitted the board does not conduct such investigations. The Brooklyn DA's office has not publicly indicated any interest. And the candidate herself has gone quiet after promising a comment.
Accountability in cases like these tends to evaporate when officials decline to show up or answer questions. The pattern is familiar: irregularities surface, watchdogs sound alarms, the responsible parties go silent, and the system moves on without consequences.
Thirty-four signatures will get their day in Kings County Supreme Court. Mirville-Shahzada's legal challenge to the BOE's invalidation will play out in the weeks before the June 23 primary. Whether the Brooklyn District Attorney takes any interest remains an open question, one the BOE spokesperson pointedly refused to address.
The facts already on the record are severe. Two dead voters. A 99-year-old woman whose family says she never signed. Three thousand names from people outside the district or unregistered. And a candidate who collected more than five thousand signatures, ninety percent of which could not survive basic scrutiny.
Sharon Gelbfish put it plainly: "This is our democracy nowadays." She meant it as a lament. It ought to be taken as a demand, for investigation, for referral, and for the kind of consequences that make the next candidate think twice before putting a dead voter's name on a government form.
