Professor Jerry Goldfeder wrote an op-ed in the New York Law Journal about whether voters should retain the choice of voting for a candidate with a checkered past.
On Nov. 7, 2017, Mohamed Albanna was elected to the Lackawanna City Council. One of New York’s smaller cities (pop. 18,141, according to the 2010 census), Lackawanna is just south of Buffalo, near Lake Erie. Albanna’s election was immediately certified by the local board of elections, and he was due to take his oath of office on Jan. 1, 2018. In late December, however, the New York Supreme Court in Erie County found him ineligible and removed him. The basis for the court’s determination was that Albanna had pled guilty to the felony of operating an unlicensed money transmission business 11 years earlier, and, according to the petition (brought by Lackawanna’s Mayor), his crime constituted “moral turpitude.” Under the Lackawanna City Charter, a crime “involving moral turpitude” renders a candidate ineligible to serve in public office. Albanna appealed, and the decision was affirmed. Szymanski v. Albanna, 157 A.D.3d 1189 (4th Dep’t 2018).
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Only a handful of New York’s cities (Lackawanna, Ogdensburg, Plattsburgh and Poughkeepsie) explicitly bar from public service a candidate guilty of moral turpitude. Other cities exclude those who have committed felonies, and some disqualify candidates who have, simply, committed any crime. The first and most obvious issue raised by Lackawanna’s ban is its ambiguity. One need only consider the back-and-forth arguments in the Szymanski litigation to conclude that a definition of the term “moral turpitude” is elusive. As such, disqualification on this ground arguably violates the due process rights of an otherwise eligible candidate, not to mention his or her supporters’ First Amendment associational rights.
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[T]he central question is whether voters should retain the choice of voting for a candidate with a checkered past, or even a “carpetbagger.”