HARRY SIEGEL, DAILY NEWS
The last time the city had an apparently uncontrollable problem with gun violence, a massive budget hole deficit and a mayor who endlessly pleaded for help that wasn’t coming from Republicans in Washington while holding off on making hard decisions within his own power, New Yorkers ended up replacing that mayor with the guy who’s been seen lately raving, wild-eyed with hair dye dripping down his face, about a supposed massive conspiracy by the “Democrat cities” to steal the election that judges keep laughing out of their courtrooms.
[ Daily News ]Following the presidential election, former Mayor Rudy Giuliani has been hard at work spearheading Donald Trump’s floundering attempts to disqualify millions of ballots based on evidence-free voter fraud claims. In lieu of proof, Giuliani implored Pennsylvania lawmakers last week to, in the words of the Daily News, to “trust his gut feeling that all 682,770 mail-in ballots cast in the state’s Democrat-heavy Philadelphia and Allegheny Counties are fraudulent.”
As Giuliani himself put it, “I know crooks really well,” he said. “You give them an inch and they take a mile, and you give them a mile and they take your whole country.”Trusting anyone’s hunch is not a compelling argument to overturn an election, but Giuliani in particular does not deserve such an extraordinary benefit of the doubt. Because he has a long history of making unsubstantiated voter fraud accusations, ever since his first race for office. Moreover, Giuliani has faced his own accusations of election improprieties, including some he personally confirmed.
Giuliani’s pattern of shaky voter fraud accusations dates back to his first mayoral bid, before he even secured the Republican nomination. In July 1989, he filed two challenges against the nomination petition signatures of his primary opponent, cosmetics heir Ron Lauder. Giuliani separately claimed that Lauder’s petition signatures for the Republican and Conservative Party ballot lines were largely fraudulent. The case went to court, where a special referee concluded that Lauder did not engage in the fraud Giuliani claimed, then a judge upheld Lauder’s petitions.
The 1989 general election was the next opportunity for Giuliani to make baseless fraud claims. According to Giuliani critic Wayne Barrett’s biography “Rudy!,” his election night party was “filled with ugly untruths about how blacks had stolen the election at polls in Harlem and Bed-Stuy, where the dead had supposedly voted by the thousands.” In the decades thereafter, Giuliani’s voter-fraud fable gained further details: people voted multiple times, unauthorized immigrants used fake documents to vote, and votes for David Dinkins were added to voting machines in advance. As recently as 2016, Giuliani asserted on CNN, “When I ran for mayor of New York City the first time, some people voted eight or 10 times.” Leading into the 1993 mayoral race, Giuliani and Republicans were claiming election fraud months before a single vote was cast. That July, State Sen. Michael Nozzolio, a Republican, held a hearing that would allegedly expose election fraud. The New York Times reported of the hearing that “A coalition of civic groups…testified that while the board suffered from serious management problems, there did not appear to be any evidence of vote-rigging.” Nevertheless, Nozzolio exposed the “evidence” of election fraud during his hearing. He uncovered that there were about 20,000 duplicate voter registrations. However, the city Board of Elections had randomly checked 180 of those registrants and found that none had voted twice. Nozzolio also interrogated Dinkins campaign manager Bill Lynch for having previously paid campaign workers 50 cents for every new voter registered. The practice was legal at the time, but Nozzolio conjectured that it would increase fraud. Besides this, a Republican worker at the Board of Elections testified that former Deputy Chief Clerk Bill Perkins had allowed some new voter registration cards to be validated without a signature, which he denied and said only happened if replacing an old card.
For Election Day 1993, Giuliani and the state GOP used this voter fraud innuendo as justification for an army of poll observers, primarily made up of off-duty police and firefighters. This would supposedly protect the integrity of the vote, but critics called it a tool for voter intimidation and suppression. Such criticism was well-founded, as Giuliani later boasted that his team stopped a busload of people from voting, claiming they were engaged in voter fraud because the same bus already dropped off voters at other poll sites. (Apparently, by Rudy’s logic, a bus cannot carry different groups of people on the same day.) He added, sans evidence, that there were still fraudulent votes for Dinkins, but the GOP operation reduced them by 75%.
HARRY SIEGEL, DAILY NEWS
While the NYPD doesn’t track innocent bystanders as a category, the headlines have been full of stories lately about people who were not the intended victim: An infant in a stroller at a cookout in Brooklyn. A little girl outside a supermarket in Harlem. A mom looking out her family’s apartment window after hearing gunshots in Queens. A woman in an apartment lobby in Staten Island.
It’s been overshadowed by the 25,000 lives taken here by the pandemic, but the number of shooting victims is up 101.2% this year, to 1,730 people through November from 860 last year, with almost all of that increase coming in the last six months. It’s an unprecedented rate of increase, albeit from a relatively low starting number by historical standards, that Mayor de Blasio has repeatedly attributed to a “perfect storm” of circumstances around the virus as “everything came unglued.” He didn’t mention this summer’s George Floyd and policing protests as part of that storm, or account for why shootings would go up during it, as they have in other cities, even as most other crimes have mostly gone down.
Speaking of storms, New York City is looking at something like a $9 billion revenue shortfall over the next two years. The state is looking at a $16 billion hole, meaning it’s not going to be able to help the city but rather is going to reduce spending on us and extract more from us. That’s not to mention the MTA’s $16 billion hole over the next four years. The unemployment rate in the city is 16%, twice the national average. Infection and hospitalization numbers are rising again. Even as rents are finally sagging, an eviction crisis is looming, held off for now by a series of makeshift executive orders intended to delay what looks to be inevitable.
It’s no sure thing that 2021 is going to be any easier, even if Gov. Cuomo doesn’t swoop in and use the Financial Control Board that’s an artifact of the city’s flirtation with bankruptcy in the 1970s to exercise still more control over the city, and impose austerity on whoever the next mayor turns out to be. After decades in which the city kept moving in one direction — richer, safer and more orderly — we may really be turned around now, with our “leaders” looking out from the stern.
Even as the well-off and more easily mobile have left New York and especially Manhattan, the political conversation here has been preserved in amber since February — all talk about policing reform, higher taxes and fending off gentrification. The space between reality as people are experiencing it and reality as the political class is describing it feels as wide as at any time I can remember. It’s possible that gap won’t matter in a Democratic primary, and that the general election will be an afterthought again in our overwhelmingly Democratic city.
It’s possible that...new progressive pols really will find a way to pour billions into needed services and start really treating homelessness, addiction and mental illness as public health rather than policing issues. That the rise in shootings really is just a symptom of this very sick year, and will just end.
But we’re just eight years removed from 20 years of non-Democratic mayors running our overwhelmingly Democratic city, and we may not be so many years away from the sort of crises that could get us there again.
