Fidler Alleges Voter Fraud In Race For Kruger’s Seat

We missed it when we wrote on Monday that the campaigns of State Senate hopefuls David Storobin and Lew Fidler are going to court this week to settle their neck-and-neck race for Carl Kruger’s seat, but an eagle-eyed reader noted an interesting bit in the court documents: Councilman Lew Fidler alleged that a paid consultant for David Storobin’s campaign submitted at least 120 fraudulent votes.

According to the court documents, which we’ve embedded below (allegations begin on page 6), Fidler’s team claims Alla Pometko – a resident of Brighton Beach’s Oceana condos – submitted 177 absentee ballot applications to the Board of Elections. Almost all of them claimed to represent disabled home-bound voters, and named Pometko as their agent to submit their ballots.

So far, that’s fine and dandy. Where it starts to get really suspicious, according to the campaign, is that of the 120 that were completed, every one of them appeared to be written in the same handwriting, and the voter signed the envelope with a mark instead of a signature – with Pometko again named as the witness to the mark.

And of those 120 “home-bound” voters, 16 still managed to show up on election day and cast a vote in person. According to the court documents, Fidler’s campaign thinks this is a sign that those voters were not aware that the document they signed was a ballot.

Pometko, herself not a registered voter, was paid at least $1,470 for her work as a consultant to the Storobin campaign, financial disclosure reports indicate.

The court documents also indicate Fidler is considering suing the Board of Elections for not returning up to 200 unsigned absentee ballots to the voter for a correction, despite receiving them with ample time to do so, and thereby disenfranchising them of their vote.

Document courtesy of Daily News’ Celeste Katz.

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