Billionaire takes on elections commissioners, demands their removal

Tom Golisano

On Friday morning, at the same time that County Attorney Cheryl Green was slamming Erie County Comptroller Mark Poloncarz for doing his job, Sabres owner Tom Golisano was storming the gates at the Erie County Board of Elections. Golisano is furious that Erie County elections commissioners Ralph Mohr and Dennis Ward had accused his political committee, Responsible New York, of felony violations of the state’s election law in the final week of an election season. The accusation, he claimed, was without substance and timed to damage State Senate candidate Joe Mesi, who was running what seemed a close race against Republican Mike Ranzenhofer. Responsible New York, a committee armed by Golisano with $5 million and directed by infamous Democratic operative Steve Pigeon, had backed Mesi since its formation. Mesi lost to Ranzenhofer on Tuesday, 54 to 46 percent.

“The very people who represent us and are tasked with protecting and policing elections are using the public trust to launch their own personal attacks,” Golisano said in a prepared statement.

Good for Golisano: Mohr and Ward are anyone’s worst choice as enforcers of election law. Most years they don’t seem to give a damn about state election law, who files disclosure reports or how often; neither do most elected officials, and neither does the state board of elections. So it’s difficult to take seriously Mohr’s noises about investigating Pigeon’s committees, including Citizens for Fiscal Integrity and People for Accountable Government. On the issue of Responsible New York, Mohr and Ward are both fatally compromised: The Republican Mohr certainly hoped to cripple Mesi in his contest with Ranzenhofer for the 61st District State Senate seat; and Ward’s brother, Dan, and his wife, County Legislator Michele Iannello, both ran against Mesi in the Democratic primary for that seat. Further, Ward is allied with Len Lenihan, Pigeon’s successor as county chairman. There is no love lost there.

Golisano has filed a petition with Governor David Paterson to have Mohr and Ward removed for abusing their powers. That petition won’t likely go anywhere, no further than the allegations that Responsible New York illegally coordinated campaign activities with the authorized committees of the candidates it supported. The accusations relate to Mesi’s campaign and to Barbra Kavanaugh’s primary campaign against Assemblyman Sam Hoyt. (You can read a copy of the complaint against Responsible New York assembled by Hoyt operative Jeremy Toth at AV Daily at Artvoice.com.)

Golisano insisted on Friday, and again in an “Another Voice” column in Wednesday’s Buffalo News that there had been no coordination. (An aside: One wonders why the Buffalo News thinks that powerful men like Golisano require “Another Voice,” when they can summon television crews and newspaper headlines with the snap of their fingers.) And the evidence Mohr and Ward offered—a single check for $4,000 earmarked for Mesi’s campaign—is weak.

But suspicion gathers—not to Golisano, who is justly held a hero in this town, but to Pigeon, who is anything but, and whose circumventions of campaign finance law are both legendary and a matter of public record.

In making his case against Responsible New York, for example, Toth referred back to North District Common Councilmember Joe Golombek’s primary challenge to Hoyt in 2004:

In that campaign, Steve Pigeon directed the expenditures of hundreds of thousands of dollars against Sam Hoyt on behalf of his opponent Joe Golombek. These expenditures, all derived from the PAC Renew NYS, which was funded primarily by then County Executive Joel Giambra, far exceeded all campaign contribution limits.

Hoyt filed a complaint about the Golombek campaign and Renew NYS with the state Board of Elections in September 2004 and followed with documentation a month later, but received no response after nine months. So he wrote the Board of Elections again. Finally, in January 2006, the Board of Elections closed the complaint against Golombek—because in the interim, Renew NYS had changed its filing status to multi-candidate committee, under which its previously illegal activities would have been legal.

Except that Renew NYS was acting illegally when it spent that money against Hoyt. “It’s a little like making a horse thief simply return a stole horse after winning the Kentucky Derby with it,” Hoyt wrote to the NYSBOE in response. The message, he said, was: Break the law with impunity during the campaign, apologize later, and skate away scot-free.

Take, for another example, People for Accountable Government, another PAC controlled by Pigeon. People for Accountable Government started funneling donations and buying ads and literature for candidates in September 2007, but did not file a campaign finance disclosure form until July 2008.

That’s a minor (and all too common) infraction, whose piddling nature is somewhat offset by how easy it is simply to comply with the election law.

—geoff kelly