Anthony Miranda, the only Latino candidate running for Queens Borough President, told QNS he’s confident he’ll be back on the ballot by Monday, Feb. 3, the day his team argues the issue in court.
“It’s a non-issue,” Miranda told QNS Friday morning. “It was a bad message that [the Board of Elections] sent out to the community, and it was the wrong message. The Board of Elections has already done this in the past and there’s plenty of laws that precede this that says they should never have done it.”
At a Jan. 28 Board of Election Commissioners meeting, the agency ruled four candidates off the ballot for the borough president special election. Miranda, Danniel S. Maio, Everly D. Brown, and Jusinta Jaggassar-Ernul were all deemed invalid for one reason or another.
While the other candidates were ruled off due to complications that left them without the required amount of petition signatures (2,000), Miranda was ruled off due to, what he calls, a technicality.
Miranda’s lawyer, Angel Cruz, was an unregistered member of the campaign at the time that Cruz delivered an amended cover sheet for Miranda’s application to get on the ballot on Jan. 14. But Cruz told Miranda’s campaign manager Virginia Ramos Rios that the case law doesn’t support kicking a candidate off the ballot for this and that it’s only meant to stop people who are unaffiliated with the campaign from filing an amended cover sheet.
Miranda also told QNS that the Board of Elections already told Cruz about a previous technical mistake with the application, recognizing Cruz as an official of the campaign themselves.
“It’s just part of the [Democratic] Machine’s politics where they try to disenfranchise our communities and try to eliminate people from having a choice,” he said. “And we need to continue this fight, and we will. We haven’t stopped our campaign, we knew exactly what’s going on.”
A BOE representative told QNS that they will be going to court on Monday, when it will be decided if he’ll be on the ballot.
Tune into the QNS Podcast on Monday, Feb. 3 to hear more from Miranda and the QBP race.
