New Square, NY - Board of Elections Investigating Voting Irregularity

New Square, NY - The state Board of Elections is investigating a complaint from the Sept. 12 primary and from the 2005 election, after a poll watcher said he saw election workers give gift cards in the 2005 election to New Square voters.

Michael Castelluccio, a member of the Preserve Ramapo political party, made the initial complaint to the Rockland Board of Elections, and the county forwarded the information to the state soon after.
Castelluccio's complaint came after party poll watcher Alan Schwartz told him he was observing the voting process at a New Square polling location last year when he saw the cards being doled out by election workers. Schwartz was given one of the cards, written in Yiddish, by an election worker. It thanks residents for voting and instructs the children of the voter to redeem the card at school for a gift. The gift is not specified.

Schwartz and Castelluccio said they were prompted to go to the Board of Elections — even though nearly a year had passed — because of other, more recent, investigations into possible voter coercion and compensation.
The District Attorney's Office and the state Board of Elections are investigating an advertisement that promised free ice-cream machines to the first 2,000 Monsey residents who voted in the Sept. 12 primary.
Rabbi Michael Dick of the Monsey Jewish Center said he found the concerns over the ice-cream maker and gift cards to be exaggerated. "This is pretty minor stuff," he said. "It's not buying a vote here," he said. "They're just saying, 'Please come.' "
Dick said he realized election law forbade the compensation, but Jewish voters in Monsey and New Square were passionate about elections, supporting the candidate they believe are sympathetic to Israel and who support the voters' values.

The community has been the target of criticism for its longtime practice of forming a bloc vote to support one candidate in any particular race. But Dick likened the bloc vote to the organized support of unions or other cultural groups. The outside community, he said, should not use the recent elections investigations to target the entire bloc.