Inna Kaminsky’s Ideals

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

With all the hand wringing going on in the editorial rooms in New York about the dysfunctional legislature in Albany, it’s just amazing to see the silence over the latest shenanigans of Clarence Norman’s Democratic machine in Brooklyn as it seeks to deny ballot access and a fair election in Brighton Beach. Only our Jack Newfield and Errol Louis of the Daily News have taken up the cause of Inna Kaminsky, the Russian immigrant mother-of-two who is challenging the machine candidate, Adele Cohen, in next week’s Democratic primary.


Mrs. Kaminsky,a 27-year-old novice full of ideals, has managed to survive an attempt by Mrs. Cohen to throw her off the ballot. Now she is running on a shoestring budget of $30,000. After preserving her ballot access by a hair, she now faces more insidious impediments. Polling places with concentrations of Russian voters have been moved by the clubhouse-contaminated Board of Elections. Between 10 and 15 Russian-speaking poll workers have been transferred to another district in Sheepshead Bay.


The names of many Russian voters are “accidentally” misspelled on the voting rolls. There seems to be a pattern of practices to suppress immigrant voting in a district where Mrs. Cohen won re-election in 2001 by fewer than 100 votes. This has led Mrs. Kaminsky’s lawyers to ask the Justice Department for observers to come to Brighton Beach on primary day, but they have not had even the courtesy of a reply. It seems the Russian immigrant community in Brooklyn deserves to be protected under the Voting Rights Act – like blacks, Latinos, and Asians – but it is not covered.


What’s happening now is a rerun of last year’s dirty tricks by the Brooklyn Democrats, when Anatoly Eisenberg was thrown off the ballot at the last minute by a clubhouse judge. Mr. Eisenberg was mounting a serious challenge in a City Council district that has been grotesquely gerrymandered to split up the immigrant vote. So the machine just made his candidacy vanish. In the last three elections in Brighton beach, Russian voters seeking to vote or register were told that they should come back another day, or that their names were not on the voting rolls. Two years ago, four Russian seniors were arrested for giving out palm cards at a polling place.


In a meeting Tuesday with editors of The New York Sun, Mrs. Kaminsky said she was running on better and less overcrowded schools, more after-school programs for teenagers, and the same bilingual help for Russian voters that Chinese, Korean, and Latino immigrants receive. “I will probably lose this year,” Mrs. Kaminsky told us, “because of all these dirty tricks to disenfranchise us. But if they steal this election, I will run again in two years. The government has to intervene and give us a fair election.”


The fact is that the Russian immigrant community of Brooklyn has not been given a fair election in four years. The Brooklyn Democratic machine is too embedded in the courts, and in the Board of Elections, to permit a level playing field. An honest election is unlikely to come from a party machine whose two top officials are awaiting trial for coercing and extorting judicial candidates.


The incumbent, Mrs. Cohen, is not only a loyal cog in this local machine, but also in the state legislature, which is in disgrace for its favor-trading, do-nothing paralysis. There are those who argue that Brooklyn’s Russian immigrant community deserves its own representation, just as the city’s Dominican and Asian communities have already elected legislators who understand their particular dreams and needs. This kind of representation is the history of this city’s politics.


By our lights the shrewder approach would be for idealists like Mrs. Kaminsky to spurn the Democrats and their corrupt machine and look to the Republican Party as a cockpit of reform. It’s the tough road but the one that beckons with the potential for real change in the long run.


The New York Sun

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