Bloomberg To Petition To Be Put on Liberal Ballot
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 Bloomberg campaign plans to begin circulating petitions in 14 days in an attempt to put the mayor on the Liberal Party line in the November election.
From then, the Bloomberg camp will have about two weeks to collect 7,500 signatures if the mayor is to run on the Liberal Party line, The Politicker, a political blog, reported yesterday.
“I think it shows he has an appreciation of New York City history and the historic role of the Liberal Party in electing good mayors,” the head of the party, Henry Stern, the former parks commissioner, said yesterday of Mayor Bloomberg. “He’s run an honest administration. … If we made a mistake it was in not supporting him last time.”
As The New York Sun reported in early June, when Liberal Party leaders first started talking about supporting the mayor for re-election, a Liberal endorsement could make it possible for the mayor to tack the word “Liberal” onto the word “Republican” on the ballot in November.
Because of a quirk in New York law, if a politician has two official party endorsements – Mr. Bloomberg is expected to appear on the Republican line and might also appear on the Independence line – the name of a so-called “independent body” cannot stand on its own on the ballot.
The Liberal Party, once a powerful political party in New York State, is technically an independent body because it failed to receive 50,000 votes statewide in the last gubernatorial race.
That means the Liberal name would share a ballot box with one of the official parties backing the mayor. It’s up to the candidate to choose which ballot box houses the name of the independent body.
Mr. Stern said some members of his party are interested in going to court to try to win a separate ballot line by arguing that sharing a line violates the “equal protection” clause of the American Constitution. He said, however, that the only way to get a speedy verdict would be to sue on behalf of an aggrieved candidate, and he acknowledged that Mr. Bloomberg probably wouldn’t be interested in fighting the case.
The Liberal Party backed the then-city comptroller, Alan Hevesi, for mayor in 2001. When Mr. Hevesi came in last in the Democratic primary, he asked his supporters to support the eventual Democratic nominee, Mark Green.
