Paul Bass Photo
Sally Brown amid the avalanche: The Do-Over Era Dawns.
A last-minute petition rush is finding Democrats lining up to make not just the local Sept. 13 primary election ballot — but also the November general ballot.
As a result, New Haven will have more than a dozen Democratic primaries for aldermanic seats. And it will have rematch elections in November involving some of the same slots.
The petitions have been pouring in to New Haven’s Registrar of Voters office, from candidates allied with the Democratic Party establishment as well as those running on a union-backed team challenging party leaders.
Candidates for alderman and mayor have until 4 p.m. Wednesday to submit signatures of registered voters in order to qualify for spots both on the primary and (as independents) on the general election ballots.
Most attention has focused on the mayor’s race. Four separate Democrats hope to challenge Mayor John DeStefano in the Sept. 13 party primary. Only one of them, Jeffrey Kerekes, also took out petitions to run as an independent in the November general election. (At least three of them — Kerekes, Clifton Graves, and Anthony Dawson — claim to have collected enough signatures to make the ballot. “I’m at 2,300 now. I’m going out for another two hours,” Dawson said Wednesday morning.)
Meanwhile, below the surface, the hedge-your-bets strategy started spreading among candidates for aldermen in what is shaping up as the most competitive campaign season in New Haven in at least a decade.
By the end of Monday, 19 candidates for aldermen had taken out petitions to run in the November general election. All but one are also running in the Sept. 13 Democratic primary. Most of them are associated with an independent union-backed slate challenging the Democratic Party establishment.
The second surprise came Tuesday as candidates backed by the party establishment began taking out their own petitions to qualify for spots on the November ballot as well. The full number of party establishment-backed candidates doing so won’t be known until the end of Wednesday.
“The way it’s going now, we’re going to have the same” elections twice, observed Deputy City Clerk Sally Brown as she navigated the piles of paperwork.
Democratic Town Chairwoman Susie Voigt said she noticed candidates on both sides doing the double play only in the past week. She’s said she’s not crazy about the trend.
“We were all so angry at Joe Lieberman for doing this” when he lost the Democratic U.S. Senate primary in 2006 but then ran again — and won — as an independent in the general election, Voigt observed. “Now everybody thinks it’s OK.”
“When everybody votes outside the party system, we dilute the strength that comes from people coming together in numbers,” she argued.
Westville aldermanic candidate Adam Marchand said he and others around town want to inject more democracy into the city by running in both elections.
“One of the reasons many of us are stepping forward to run in these primaries is because we want to change the politics in New Haven. We think that for a while there’s been not enough debate, not enough richness of ideas,” Marchand said. “We have a party structure in New Haven that doesn’t offer enough debate and competition. And so it’s a good thing for the city to have more people running and to have a debate that lasts up until the general election.”
So why not run just as an independent in the general?
“I’m a Democrat. I wanted to make my case to Democrats about what I stand for and why I’m running,” Marchand responded. “We have a fair number of independent and unaffiliated voters in Ward 25. They’re going to have a chance to weigh in on these issues as well.”
Marchand’s opponent, Michael Slattery, took out papers to collect signatures for an independent run. But then he decided against it. “I’m running as a Democrat. I will respect the outcome” of the primary. He said he and Marchand had originally agreed to respect the outcome of the primary; when Slattery saw that Marchand had taken out independent petitions, he said, he at first took out the forms to “keep my options open.” But he also doesn’t want to see the city spend money on a primary that would merely be rerun in November.
As of mid-afternoon Tuesday, the list of candidates who have taken out independent petitions for the general election included:
Vinay R. Nayak in Ward 1 (Yale).
Frank Douglass and Doug Bethea in Ward 2 (Dwight).
Jackie James in Ward 3 (The Hill).
Dolores Colon and Norma Rodriguez-Reyes* in Ward 6 (The Hill).
Jessica Holmes and Matt Smith in Ward 9 (East Rock).
Barbara Constantinople in Ward 11 (East Rock).
Maureen O’Sullivan-Best in Ward 11 (Fair Haven Heights). (She’s an incumbent and an independent already.)
Brenda Jones Barnes in Ward 13 (Fair Haven Heights).
Carmen Reyes in Ward 14 (Fair Haven).
Sarah Saiano in Ward 18 (Morris Cove).
Delphine Clyburn in Ward 20 (Newhallville).
Brenda Foskey-Cyrus in Ward 21 (Newhallville).
Jeanette Morrison & Cordelia Thorpe in Ward 22 (Dixwell).
Tyisha Walker in Ward 23 (West River).
Brian Slattery in Ward 25 (Westville).
Adam Marchand in Ward 25 (Westville).
Darryl Brackeen in Ward 26 (Westville).
Angela Russell in Ward 27 (Beaver Hills).
Claudette Robinson-Thorpe and Wayne McCloud in Ward 28 (Beaver Hills).
Brian Wingate in Ward 29 (Beaver Hills).
Darnell Goldson in Ward 30 (West Rock).
Not all Democrats are hedging their bets. Board of Aldermen President Carl Goldfield, who faces a spirited challenge in Beaver Hills’ Ward 29, said he was disinclined to gather signatures for an independent slot in November.
“We’re supposedly Democrats,” Goldfield said.
Democratic Registrar of Voters Sharon Ferrucci.
Meanwhile, Democratic Registrar of Voters Sharon Ferrucci and her staff have been immersed in the process of reviewing signatures submitted by both aldermanic and mayoral candidates for the Democratic primary. She predicted it would take about a week to wade through the voluminous submissions by mayoral candidates, who each need 2,092 signatures to make the Sept. 13 primary ballot. Because aldermanic candidates need far fewer — in some cases 10 or fewer — to qualify for the general election, that approval process has gone faster. As of mid-afternoon Tuesday, the following non-endorsed candidates had qualified for the primary ballot, she said. (Candidates endorsed at the July 26 party convention did not need to gather signatures to make the ballot.)
Frank Douglass in Ward 2.
Abdias Rodriguez in Ward 3.
Norma Rodriguez-Reyes* in Ward 6.
Jessica Holmes in Ward 9.
Brenda Barnes and Josh Vega in Ward 13.
Carmen Reyes in Ward 14.
Sarah Saiano in Ward 18.
Delphine Clyburn in Ward 20.
Brenda Foskey-Cyrus in Ward 21.
Jeanette Morrison, Cordelia Thorpe and Lisa Hopkins in Ward 22.
Adam Marchand in Ward 25.
Wayne McCloud in Ward 28.
Brian Wingate in Ward 29.
Carlton Staggers in Ward 30.
Several other candidates have submitted petitions and are likely to qualify.
(*Rodriguez-Reyes publishes the Spanish-language newspaper La Voz Hispana. She also volunteers as chair of the board of the not-for-profit Online Journalism Project, which publishes the Independent.)