Title: Mayor Adams' Campaign Submitted Faked and Fraudulent Signatures

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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. A new WNYC and Gothamist investigation has uncovered dozens of apparent forgeries among the signatures submitted to get Mayor Eric Adams on the November ballot as an independent candidate to run after the Democratic primary this year. The mayor's campaign turned in nearly 50,000 signatures from voters across the City, far more than the 7,500 required.

This WNYC and Gothamist investigation by our guests today, our colleagues David Brand, Clayton Guse, and Brigid Bergin, found that at least 52 of those signatures were fake. Some belonged to people who say they never signed. Others belong to people who are dead, and in several buildings, residents said most of the names listed from their addresses were falsified. Some New Yorkers also said they were misled into signing without being told the petitions were for Adams.

The campaign hired multiple firms to gather signatures, including one run by consultants who had worked on national political campaigns and who had previously been accused of using deceptive tactics. Some workers were under pressure to collect as many signatures as possible with little time for oversight. The campaign says it expected vendors to follow the law and is now reviewing the petitions. New York's Board of Elections doesn't verify whether signatures are valid, only whether there are enough of them, and by the time the story came to light, the deadline to formally challenge the petitions had already passed.

Spoiler alert: Adams is staying on the ballot. We'll talk about what David and Clayton, and Brigid found and what all of this means for Mayor Adams' reelection campaign and perhaps for the system of petition signature gathering going forward. David, Clayton, Brigid, glad to have you all on the show. Oh my God, so many of us in one place at one time. Hi.

Clayton Guse: Hi, Brian.

David Brand: Packed house, Brian. Thanks for having us.

Brigid Bergin: Good morning.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, maybe you've heard the radio version of this, which has aired. Maybe you read the Gothamist version, and so we invite some of your calls with questions or comments for our guests on their investigation into these dubious signatures on the mayor's petitions. Were you approached to sign a ballot petition for Eric Adams? Did you feel fully informed about what or who you were signing for, or any other way you can help us report this story or anything else you want to ask? 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, call or text. Clayton, how did you even decide to look at these petitions? What led you to think there might be a story there?

Clayton Guse: Yes, I think a few things went into that, Brian. We started thinking about this right around the primary, right? It just brings things back into context. Back in April, a couple more than two months before the primary, Adams had just had his federal corruption charges dropped at the request of the Trump administration. A day later, he says, "I'm going to run not as a Democrat, but on an independent line."

He would skip the primary, right? The primary is what gives a mayoral candidate a mandate to be on the ballot in the general election. He says, "I'm going to skip that process." Instead, in order to run on an independent line, he would need to collect signatures. He said he was going to run on two ballot lines, "EndAntiSemitism" and "Safe & Affordable." He has to pick one. He would need, under state law, 7,500 signatures for each of those lines.

As the primary, all eyes in the City were on the primary race. We decided to take a look at Adams' campaign finances. We identified that he was the only mayoral candidate this year to hire an out-of-state firm to help collect signatures, which struck us as interesting. We began to look into that firm and found that some of the subcontractors they had hired in New York last year to collect signatures for Robert F. Kennedy's independent presidential run to get him on the ballot were obtained by, in some cases, allegedly deceptive tactics that the subcontractor was using.

All of this struck us as interesting. What we did was we went to the Board of Elections and began to pull all 50,000 signatures that the mayor had submitted, and just on an early spot check, we found some inconsistencies. We began hitting phone numbers, began finding people who said, "I didn't sign. I wouldn't sign." It was a big surprise to learn that they were on these sheets, and then we pulled all of the pages, went through all of them, in very tedious work, hit a tremendous number of phone numbers, as you mentioned in your intro, found a bunch of buildings where there was a lot of signatures clustered, door-knocked on those apartments, identified dozens of people who said that they didn't sign or that they were misled into signing, and that's how we got here. I guess, from a reporting perspective, it was really like zigging while the rest of the news cycle was zagging on the primary.

Brian Lehrer: Yes. Brigid, since you're the most experienced among us in following over the years how New York City elections are held and how small-d democratic they are, how big of a deal is 52 falsified signatures? Mayor Adams said, essentially, "Everybody does this." All campaigns have some of these, and that's why his campaign thought it important to get more than the 7,500 signatures required by law, so many more, because they wound up with 50,000. How big a deal is this actually in terms of anything that should tar people's image of Eric Adams?

Brigid Bergin: Sure. I think there are a few things to consider in answering that question. First of all, when those petitions are submitted to the Board of Elections, as you mentioned, the Board of Elections does not go through line by line to verify the signatures. Under law, their responsibility and their role, which is, as one attorney described to us, a ministerial role, is to confirm that they have submitted what appears to be the right number of signatures and that they've filled out what are called cover sheets correctly with contact information for the campaign and labels for these different volumes of petitions, et cetera.

Then, from there, it becomes a burden on both voters and oftentimes opposing candidates to go, and if they were to examine or challenge those petitions, there's a very narrow time frame within the law with which they can do that, either three days to file the first set of what are called general objections, just stating that in writing, that appears to be on a problem with these petitions, but then they need to submit what are called specific specifications within six days, and those also have to be in writing and served to the candidate.

It's a pretty complicated process, as Clayton was describing in terms of our own reporting. That's not unlike what a campaign would have to do in terms of going line by line. It's very tedious. It's laborious. It's time-consuming, and when you submit so many more signatures than are required, it acts as a deterrent to a campaign who might want to examine those signatures and challenge them.

One of the things that we heard repeatedly from election lawyers was a term called "padding the petition," meaning they would, as Clayton said, they're required to submit 7,500 signatures. They would be advised by their counsel and others to collect far and above that to ensure that some of the signatures that were collected that are not valid wouldn't be enough to get them tossed from the ballot.

I think what we expect, and we have seen traditionally in candidates who have had signature issues is there are times when people will sign a petition, and it turns out, for example, in a City Council race, maybe they're outside of the City Council district, so their signature wouldn't count because they're not within the bounds of this district, or it turns out they're not actually a registered Democrat, so their signature wouldn't count in a Democratic petition.

For an independent nominating petition, for a citywide election, the only requirements are that you are a registered voter in the City of New York. The signature is supposed to be signed by the individual whose name is appearing on that document. One of the things that really raised a flag to us was when David and Clayton were knocking on doors, asking people about their signatures, and encountered people.

In one case, the one that jumps to my mind all the time was a woman, Leila Lieberman, who, when she was asked about if Adam Lieberman lived at that apartment. [clears throat] Excuse me. That was her stepson, who had died close to 30 years ago. And when you think about, "Okay, well, how did that person's name end up on a petition?" that raises a lot of questions, because--

Brian Lehrer: How did it? Do you know? That's such a clear example. That would raise people's eyebrows as they're listening to you. Did you find out how Adam Lieberman's name got on that petition?

Clayton Guse: Go ahead, Brigid.

Brigid Bergin: Go for it, Clayton.

Clayton Guse: Yes. We have one idea, because he's still registered to vote. He died in 1997, but according to records and date of birth that we looked up, he's still registered to vote in New York City. There is. If I were doing that, if I were doing this, I would, and we're pulling voter registration data and just filling it out, that's one way that that could have happened. Because it would clearly be impossible for him to sign, considering he's not with us [unintelligible 00:10:35]

Brian Lehrer: In other words, if you were making up fake signatures to add to the ballot, you would be looking at the names on the voter rolls.

Clayton Guse: Correct.

Brian Lehrer: That's how that could have happened. Well, Brigid, how is it that somebody who's been dead for 30 years is still registered to vote? Don't they purge those periodically?

Brigid Bergin: It is a challenge to make sure that the voter rolls are completely clean. The Board of Elections does do list maintenance, but if they are mailing their voter information to an address, and it doesn't get returned, and they don't get notified from a death notice of some sort that the person is no longer there, then there is a chance that someone who is dead could still be on the rolls.

We have seen that in the past, but there is no chance that someone who is dead, whose name is still in the rolls, could sign a petition, and so that is what makes it particularly troubling in this case, because while there may be issues with some list maintenance issues of the voter rolls, that shouldn't be a factor in filling out petitions if the person who says they're signing is actually the person who's signing.

Brian Lehrer: That leads to you, David Brand, our housing reporter, and thank you for your patience while your colleagues Clayton and Brigid were answering the first few questions. Maybe it's because you are our housing reporter that you were assigned to River Park Towers in the Bronx in particular, where you uncovered a cluster of forged signatures, some from people who had moved away, some from people who are out of the country, and at least one from someone who's no longer alive. You can tell us if that's the exact one we've been talking about. What did your reporting show about the scale of the problem in this particular set of buildings, the River Park Towers?

David Brand: Clayton started talking to me about his findings after he went to the Board of Elections and photographed these thousands of these forms, and one that he found that seemed questionable were all of these signatures clustered at addresses at River Park Towers, and any listener who's ever been on the Major Deegan going north or I guess coming south from the George Washington Bridge knows these buildings.

They're these massive, like 42-story high-rises, between the highway and the Harlem River, and so a landmark. That got me more interested because it's like, "Well, this could be a potential bonanza for anyone trying to get signatures. There's 5,000 people here, everyone in a small contained area." Then I started looking up some phone numbers from these people on these forms, just looking through public records.

I actually reached a couple of people pretty early on who said one guy in particular was like, "I haven't lived there in 35 years, and I haven't voted or signed anything since Ronald Reagan was president." Another person told me he lived in South Carolina. That really piqued my interest. I traveled up there and made a list of all of the addresses. There's four buildings. I was like, "Okay, I'm going to hit this building first. I'm going to start on the 10th floor because there's a number of people here on the 10th floor."

Very first person I was looking for, a woman named Regina. I knocked on the door associated with her. The woman who opened it said, "No, there's no Regina here. I've lived here for seven years. There's never been a person named Regina." I said, "Okay, what's your name?" Her name's Leanna. I looked up her name quickly. I saw that she was actually listed on one of these petition forms.

I showed it to her. She's like, "That's my name. That is not my signature." "Okay, can you sign something, and can we compare what your signature looks like to this first initial, scribbled last name on this page?" She signed something completely different. I realized we're really onto something here. Knocked on a few other people's doors in that same building. You knock on a lot of doors every 10. You end up getting someone.

Two doors later, I was looking for a woman named Tatiana. Person who opened the door started laughing. He was like, "Tatiana, come here." I was like, "Whoa, what's going on here?" The woman who came to the door, her name was not Tatiana, and the joke was that they have been getting Tatiana's mail for the past 10 years, but don't know who this woman is. She's never lived there.

She couldn't have signed. The same thing kept happening. Went to another woman who looked at it. She's like, "I was out of the country," and she was angry. We've seen this all over the place. We wanted to show this was more than just maybe one rogue person who was like, "I don't want to go up all these stairs in River Park Towers. I'll just sit at my table and write all these names."

Maybe that happened, maybe it didn't. We wanted to show this was something we were finding all over the City. We talked to people in Staten Island who said they weren't familiar with these forms or didn't know that they were signing for Adams. I went to Pomonok Houses in Queens. It's a NYCHA complex in the Flushing area. Talked to a number of people, same experience. We went to Morningside Gardens, a big complex in Morningside Heights, where--

Clayton Guse: Yes, Morningside. That complex is where Leila Lieberman, who we mentioned, the stepmother of Adam Lieberman, lives. Also, door-knocking in that building, we found a lot of public radio supporters, so we should give them kudos.

Brian Lehrer: You asked them to sign up as members at the same time you were asking them if they really signed a petition? No, maybe not. Listener writes, Brigid, "52 out of thousands, just drop those from the list and punish the subcontractors." Another person writes, "Since your guests have been looking into this for six months, why did they miss the deadline to challenge Adams based on having forged signatures?"

Brigid, why don't you take that first one-

Brigid Bergin: Sure.

Brian Lehrer: -first? You knew when the deadline was. This investigation has been going on for a while. We know that this can't result in anything because the deadline for challenging petition signatures has already passed.

Brigid Bergin: Well, a couple of things. As much as I wish that we could have been reporting on this for six months, it was not quite that long. We actually didn't begin this reporting until just around the time of the mayoral primary, which is a little bit more than a month ago, so late June, early July, and when we started doing the reporting, it was prompted, as Clayton explained, by some things that jumped out to us in the campaign finance filing, and then we further started digging into some of the petitions in connection with that.

The deadlines for filing these challenges and potentially a lawsuit were butting up against when the primary was really hitting its peak, something which we were also reporting on. For someone to have had to challenge these signatures, that initial objection would have had to have been filed on May 23rd, since the candidate, the Adams campaign, filed all of their 50,000 signatures on May 20th.

Three days later, May 23rd, then if someone were to challenge with specific objections, it would have been within six days, May 26th. Oh, that happened to be Memorial Day, so through Memorial Day weekend, and then the time to file any potential lawsuit, potentially, if you are going to skip the Board of Elections challenge process, which probably in this case, if one of the issues that someone was raising were questions about potential fraud, that is something that the Board of Elections would not have ultimately ruled on anyhow; it would have gone to court and a proceeding to invalidate signatures or petitions would have need to be filed by June 10th, the same week as the first mayoral debate.

Brian Lehrer: Yes. Are you pointing to a structural issue here, which is that the deadline for challenging petitions on these signatures to get on the ballot is so soon after the deadline for filing the petitions that it's unrealistic to expect almost anybody in any race to be able to file challenges, even if there are a lot of forgeries there?

Brigid Bergin: Yes, but it is not uncommon. Anyone who is in politics, any of the election lawyers that we talk to, knows it is not uncommon for people to file challenges to signatures. It is uncommon, from what those experts told us, to see something that is of a larger scale, and there are some people who say that this system is basically at this point just a way for consultants to make a lot of money off of collecting signatures, potentially creating a lot of stress for campaigns, but that if you're required to collect 7,500 signatures, why would someone be collecting, submitting 50,000?

That's far more than padding the petition. That's a huge number of signatures. I want to note one other thing, Brian. Even though we as a public media institution, we care about our voters, our audience, and that's where our focus was. One of the things that drove this reporting was hearing so often from voters, from people who were finding their names on documents, and those individuals, those people saying, "Wait a second, that's not my name. I didn't sign that."

That really was the thing that kept spurring us on, and it is worth noting that, yes, under election law, those constraints are very narrow. When you petition fraud under the state's penal law is a felony, which is something that one of the election law experts noted for us, and the window for pursuing that type of fraud is much wider. There's a five-year statute of limitations there, and so even though the potential punishment of removing a candidate from the ballot is not something that is still on the table, there are still issues of accountability and certainly it's still information that a voter who's making their mind up about who they want to support is something we thought it was worth telling them.

Brian Lehrer: A number of listeners also want to know if you're singling out Adams and targeting him for any reason. One listener texts, "What did your guests find for the other candidates? Are they only targeting Adams?" Another one from another phone number writes, "Did you spot-check any of the other candidates' submissions for meeting the article? There were clear questions you could see in some of the petitions," and goes on from there, but asks that question, "Did you spot-check any of the other candidates' submissions?" I think Jack in Manhattan is going to be in that lane, too. Jack, you're on WNYC. Thank you for calling in.

Jack: Hi, Brian. I managed some political campaigns a long time ago in Manhattan and in the City. I don't know. I read the Gothamist piece, and I think it said there were 52 faulty signatures that were found.

Clayton Guse: That's right.

Jack: 52 out of 50,000. You could be running as clean a petition campaign as humanly possible, and 52 signatures could get on there easily, and [crosstalk]-

Brian Lehrer: Jack, oh, go ahead. Do you want to finish your thought?

Jack: -by any stretch of the imagination. I'm just saying that's really nothing to get our underwear in a bundle about.

Brian Lehrer: Jack, thank you very much. There is an analogy I hadn't heard on the show before.

Clayton Guse: I like that one.

[laughter]

Brian Lehrer: Clayton, you want to take that?

Clayton Guse: Yes. There's a data point that we've featured in our story that was central to this that we haven't hit on yet in this segment, and it's that the scale of it, the number of people whose signatures that they turned in were told or flagged to us as potentially fraudulent or collected in a misleading fashion, there were dozens of petitioners. Through this painstaking investigative work, we identified nine who had turned in signatures that the people whose names they bear said that they were illegitimate or fraudulent.

Those nine petitioners who identified were pretty prolific, many of them were. They turned in a combined upwards of 5,000 signatures in total, right? We confirmed 52. There could be hundreds or thousands more. This work, you go through a neighborhood and door-knock on 50 doors. You're lucky to get a couple of people answering, and if they're not there, or they can't confirm it, then that's it.

The scale here, the number of people who were engaging in this behavior is a key piece of this, and those people who we confirmed collected about 10% of the overall universe of Adam's signatures. That doesn't mean all those signatures they collected are illegitimate, but those people had turned in a collective 5,000 signatures.

Brian Lehrer: Let me just get to one more, before we run out of time, issue that you flagged here. I mentioned it in the intro, but we haven't discussed it yet, and that is that some New Yorkers told you their signatures weren't necessarily forged, but they weren't fully informed either about what they were signing, and I think we have a story like that on the phone, or at least an allegation. Pia in Long Island City, you're on WNYC. Hi, Pia.

Pia: Hi. There are a lot of deceptive practices that I have seen, and one of them, for Eric Adams, a petitioner I saw, and I want voters to really, when they sign something, look at the paper from top to bottom. There was a deceptive practice of folding the top so you don't see which candidate you're signing for. I really want to take a moment for voter education. When you are signing a petition, make sure you see who is on the ballot.

There can be more than one candidate, and I also want you to make sure that you are signing in the right district. Please look at that as well. There are so many ways that your signature can be invalid. Spell out your street. Spell out your avenue. Make sure your signature looks like the signature on your driver's license. Make sure the statement of witness that the person who is signing and the person who's watching you sign, that they are a registered Democrat in New York. There are many deceptive practices, but as voters, we need to be educated on what we sign and what the practices of an elected is doing.

Brian Lehrer: Voter educator, self-appointed, I guess. Pia in Long Island City. Thank you for all that. The part of that that I wanted to ask about, David, maybe you can take this, David Brand, is that apparently, some of the voters you talked to thought they were signing a generic petition or helping an "independent candidate," without being told it was for Eric Adams in particular. How common were those kinds of accounts? Is this a practice that these for-profit signature-gathering companies use?

David Brand: Well, we talked to some people who said that they signed, and then we said, "Oh, you signed for Mayor Adams." They said, "Wait, what? I didn't know I was signing for Mayor Adams." Then I took a closer look after having that conversation for maybe like the fifth time with someone at the actual form where their names appeared, and I saw that it was folded right under Eric Adams' name, and looking closer at a lot of these forms, kept seeing that over and over again, dozens of forms that were creased right below his name.

I started talking to more people whose names appeared on that, and they said, "Oh, yes, we were told this was for an independent candidate or to get independent candidates on the ballot." One person even told me they were told it was for another candidate altogether, and so that kind of deceptive tactic was used in another campaign that was for presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., in New York last year.

That tactic got some news attention, led to a lawsuit, and a judge ruled that folding to hide the candidate's name and then not telling people who they are signing for is a form of fraud. We kept seeing that over and over again, and that's another way where we have these 52 people who told us they were misled, or they told us their name was forged or falsified. Then there's all of these other forms with 10 signatures each, talking hundreds of signatures, potentially thousands, that are on these forms where the name of the candidate might have been obscured.

Brian Lehrer: Yes. We're just about out of time. Clayton, I'll give you the last question, as we stipulate that there's no way that there was enough here to indicate that Adams didn't have enough valid signatures to get on the ballot. What are the possible consequences when forged signatures do show up on petitions? Could these workers or the companies, the vendors, because these are, you established, some for-profit companies in many cases, because they didn't have enough volunteers, face criminal charges? Is accountability a possibility?

Clayton Guse: Yes, and I think that it depends on how and if local prosecutors engage with us. Last week, we reached out to all the DA's offices as we flagged this behavior or activity in all five boroughs. No one's as of yet said that they're investigating. A thing here that we've really thought about is that a lot of these people, some of them out of state, who come in and collect signatures, one of them told us that many of his colleagues are functionally homeless.

It's gig work. In some cases, we found people that travel state to state, who live across the City, picking up gig work, desperate for any $30-an-hour job, who engaged in some of this or at least participate in a signature gathering. Where the accountability lies, I think, is a good question, and it's something that we're going to be exploring as we move on. I think there's two things at bay here.

The question is, is it just on these people who were sent out with whatever circumstances or instructions to get signatures in this world of signature for hire, or someone higher up in the campaign, or someone who hired them? I think that's a question of who deserves to be accountable. I think more largely is that this is material information in an election year, and it's something that we're going to keep reporting on, the scope of this.

We're continuing to knock on doors. We're continuing to make phone calls, and I think it is pertinent information, as the voters decide who's going to be the next mayor and if the current mayor deserves a chance at reelection. I think it's all relevant there because the real accountability ultimately in the City isn't going to happen in the civil courts or who's on the ballot via the Board of Elections; it's going to be decided by the voters in November.

Brian Lehrer: Clayton Guse, a WNYC and Gothamist editor. David Brand, WNYC and Gothamist housing reporter. Brigid Bergin, WNYC and Gothamist senior political correspondent. If you missed it on the radio, you can find their investigation on Gothamist under the headline, "Forged Signatures Found on Mayor Adams' Petitions to Run as an Independent." Thanks a lot for coming on the show and discussing it with everybody.

Clayton Guse: Thank you, Brian.

David Brand: Thank you.

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