Robert Gevertzman, a longtime southern Brooklyn civic leader and former member of Community Board 15, died in March 2025 at the age of 76. He cleared the petition-checking process anyway, and now his name is slated to appear on next month's Democratic primary ballot for a Kings County Democratic Committee seat, directly below House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries.
His widow, June Gevertzman, told the New York Post she had no idea her husband was listed as a candidate. She called the situation "silly" and said she would prefer him removed from the ballot.
But the dead man's name remains. And Republican officials in Brooklyn say the whole episode is part of a broader pattern of petition misconduct by local Democrats, one that extends beyond a deceased candidate to canvassers allegedly lying to voters about which party their candidates belong to.
The petitions that included Gevertzman's name circulated earlier this year across parts of Brooklyn's 45th Assembly District, covering neighborhoods like Sheepshead Bay, Gravesend, and Manhattan Beach. The Post reviewed copies of those petitions, which highlighted Jeffries' name at the top and listed Gevertzman alongside two other candidates backed by the Kings County Democratic Committee.
All three committee candidates are running unopposed for seats on the committee, which holds more than 4,400 positions. Gevertzman, according to critics quoted by the Post, was a well-known centrist Democrat, more popular in the Sheepshead Bay and Manhattan Beach areas than the party apparatus might otherwise be. His presence on the petition, they allege, may have helped draw signatures for Jeffries' re-election effort.
Jeffries' camp told the Post it was not involved in the signature-gathering process. Jeffries himself declined to comment.
That silence is consistent with a pattern. Jeffries has declined to address party controversies before, leaving questions unanswered while the political machinery beneath him grinds forward.
The dead-candidate problem was not the only allegation. The Post also reported that video provided by an undercover GOP operative captured petition canvassers misleading voters about the party affiliations of two Democratic candidates: Joey Cohen-Saban and state Sen. Sam Sutton.
Cohen-Saban, described as a longtime lefty operative and the local Democratic district leader, is seeking enough petition signatures to qualify for a third-party ballot line, the "Fight Antisemitism Party", to boost his candidacy in a race to unseat Republican state Assemblyman Michael Novakhov. Sutton, a sitting Democratic state senator, was also listed on the petitions for the same third-party line.
In a video filmed outside a supermarket on Avenue U in Gravesend, an unidentified canvasser was recorded repeatedly telling a passerby that Cohen-Saban and Sutton are "independents." When the undercover operative asked directly, "These guys, they're not Democrats?", the canvasser responded, "No, no."
Both Cohen-Saban and Sutton are Democrats.
A second video, filmed the following day, captured the same canvasser and a different companion again allegedly claiming Cohen-Saban is not a Democrat while soliciting a petition signature. The footage was provided to the Post by Republican operatives.
Cohen-Saban acknowledged the Gevertzman listing but dismissed it as "nothing more" than a "clerical error," adding "we regret" the situation. As for the canvassers misrepresenting his party status, Cohen-Saban offered a different explanation. He said petition circulators initially did not understand that a candidate can run on more than one ballot line.
"They didn't know that someone could run on more than one line. It [has since been] made clear to these petition circulators that they are collecting third-party-signatures for candidates that are already on the Democratic line."
That explanation asks voters to believe that the people collecting signatures for a Democratic district leader's third-party ballot line somehow did not know he was a Democrat, and that when asked point-blank on camera, they denied it by accident.
Brooklyn Republican Party Chairman Liam McCabe was not buying it. He pointed to a broader irony, noting that Jeffries has previously accused Republicans of needing to cheat to win elections.
"It's funny that Hakeem Jeffries accused the Republicans of needing to cheat to win, and we literally have found multiple examples of Democrats in his own Congressional district cheating and lying to win including with petitions with his name at top. Unfortunately, the joke is on us."
Novakhov, the Republican assemblyman Cohen-Saban is trying to unseat, was more direct. He and other borough Republican figures contend that Cohen-Saban and Brooklyn Democratic Party Chairperson Rodneyse Bichotte Hermelyn are "the main culprits" behind the alleged effort to mislead voters.
Novakhov stated that the conduct was "disgraceful, dishonest, and an insult to the voters of this district and to the Gevertzman family."
"Running dead people shocks the conscience, and so does lying to and misleading the voters about which party you represent."
Bichotte Hermelyn, who chairs the Brooklyn Democratic Party and serves as a state assemblywoman, did not return messages from the Post. That leaves the party's top local official silent on both the dead candidate and the canvasser allegations.
The pattern is not new for Brooklyn Democrats. Dead voters' signatures have previously surfaced on Brooklyn Democratic nominating petitions, with one case resulting in 90 percent of filings being thrown out. That the same borough's party apparatus would allow a deceased man to clear the petition-checking process and land on a primary ballot raises obvious questions about whether anyone is actually checking.
The Kings County Democratic Committee, with its 4,400-plus seats, operates as one of the largest local party organizations in the country. Most of those seats attract little public attention. That obscurity is precisely what makes them useful as vehicles for petition-gathering, a voter signing to help a familiar name like Gevertzman may also be signing to help Jeffries, whether they realize it or not.
Critics quoted in the Post's reporting allege that was the point: Gevertzman's local popularity, particularly in the Sheepshead Bay and Manhattan Beach neighborhoods, could attract signatures from voters who might otherwise have skipped the petition entirely.
Jeffries, for his part, has been at the center of multiple political controversies in recent months, though his camp insists he had nothing to do with the Brooklyn petition operation. Whether that insulation holds depends on whether anyone in the party's leadership is forced to answer for what happened on the ground.
No election authority has made an official finding about the petitions or the alleged misrepresentations by canvassers. It remains unclear who specifically filed or circulated the petitions that included Gevertzman's name, or whether any formal complaint has been lodged.
The names of the two other Kings County Democratic Committee-backed candidates on the petitions have not been publicly identified. The canvassers captured on video remain unidentified as well.
Jeffries' campaign has not provided any written statement beyond its initial declination. And Bichotte Hermelyn, the person whose job it is to oversee the Brooklyn Democratic Party's operations, has offered nothing at all.
The 45th Assembly District, which the Post described as a district favorable to President Trump, is one of the few competitive political battlegrounds in Brooklyn. That makes the integrity of the petition process there more than an administrative footnote. If Cohen-Saban secures his "Fight Antisemitism Party" ballot line through signatures gathered under false pretenses, it could affect the outcome of a real race against a sitting Republican assemblyman.
Jeffries has also drawn scrutiny for his broader political conduct, including heated rhetoric that prompted calls for accountability from the other side of the aisle. His name sitting atop petitions that also carry a dead man's name and feed into an alleged misrepresentation scheme does nothing to quiet those concerns.
Meanwhile, Jeffries continues to position himself as a national Democratic leader, making public pronouncements on foreign policy and institutional legitimacy. Back home in Brooklyn, the machinery that keeps him on the ballot apparently cannot tell the living from the dead.
Cohen-Saban wants voters to see a clerical error. Republicans see something more deliberate. The facts on the record, a dead man who cleared petition review, canvassers caught on camera denying their candidates' party affiliation, and a party chairwoman who will not return phone calls, do not resolve the question. But they do paint a picture of a local party operation where accountability is optional and oversight is an afterthought.
When your petition process cannot distinguish between the living and the dead, the problem is not a typo. It is a culture that treats voters as a formality.
