September 2, 2002
Will Jimmy's count count?
Former Buffalo Mayor Jimmy Griffin's petition campaign to recall his successor seems to have flopped. But it's not quite dead.
Will Jimmy's count count?
Former Buffalo Mayor Jimmy Griffin's petition campaign to recall his successor seems to have flopped. But it's not quite dead.
On Friday, August 29, Erie County Elections Commissioners Ralph M. Mohr and Laurence F. Adamczyk sent Buffalo City Clerk Charles L. Michaux III a letter reporting that 10,022 of the 21,129 signatures on petitions to have a recall election filed by former Buffalo Mayor Jimmy Griffin were invalid.
That left Griffin with 11,107 valid signatures, 3429 short of the 14,536 legitimate signatures he needed if he was going to force current Mayor Anthony Masiello to defend himself before the voters this November.
The bulk of the rejections—8,657 signatures—were because the signers could not be identified as qualified Buffalo voters. The other fell into four groups: 56 were dated more than 30 days before filing of the petition; 332 didn't provide both a full residential address and the date; 241 are qualified to vote now but were not qualified at the time of the last general election; and 8 were people who signed petitions more than once. The report said there were "several glaring instances where a few specific subscribing witnesses engaged in what appears to be fraudulent activity in the obtaining of signatures upon the petition."
The specifics were news; the conclusion wasn't. Joe Illuzzi had it on his website at least a full day before the report was released and I heard about it at City Hall a week earlier, shortly after Mayor Masiello gave his brief August 22 press conference about signing the Common Council restructuring referendum.
Someone said, "Tony signed that only because he's already been told about the recall count. He wouldn't have signed that if he was facing a recall. He's safe to do what the Buffalo News wants because he's never going to run for anything again in Buffalo. If he knew he had to deal with all those angry blacks and Hispanics in an election he'd have found a way to back off."
The speaker and Tony Masiello may indeed have known on August 22 how the Commissioners were going to report. The speaker may also have been merely speculating and Tony merely hoping.
I quoted the remark to someone else in local government later in the day. That person said, "No way Tony wasn't going to sign it. He's said to many times he was going to sign it. If he backed off now or folds he'd look like an idiot. And there's too much pressure on him to sign."
There's a good bit of crowing on the second floor of City Hall about Griffin's flop. No surprise there: Tony Masiello's local ratings weren't very good before the Common Council mess; they're surely a lot worse now. Angry people are far more likely to vote than people who are not angry. If Griffin's petitions had survived inspection the City Government event that the Buffalo News and developer Carl Paladino seem to fear most might come about: should Masiello lose a recall vote, Common Council President James Pitts automatically would become mayor of Buffalo.
The commissioners' report is being challenged, I was told, and the challengers say there is a real possibility that enough of those rejected signatures will shift over to the accepted column to send the recall question to the voters. I've had no experience with this sort of thing so I can't tell if that's an accurate prediction or wishful thinking. The noise, at any rate, is not over.