Two Brooklyn voters who died in 2010 somehow signed nominating petitions last month for a Democratic State Assembly candidate, and that's only the beginning of the problems on her paperwork. The New York City Board of Elections has now invalidated 90 percent of the 5,258 signatures submitted by candidate Marie Mirville-Shahzada, leaving her 21 names short of the threshold to appear on the June 23 primary ballot.
The New York Post reported that both deceased voters would be over 100 years old today, and that Social Security records confirm they passed away more than a decade ago. A third signature belongs to a 99-year-old woman named Lucia Gelbfish, whose family says she was not even in New York City on the day she supposedly put pen to paper.
Kings County Supreme Court will now examine 34 of Mirville-Shahzada's remaining 479 valid signatures to determine whether any are forgeries. If enough are struck, the candidate and her slate of district leaders could be removed from the Coney Island, to, Bay Ridge primary entirely.
Of the 5,258 signatures Mirville-Shahzada submitted, some 3,000 belonged to people who either lived outside the district or were not registered to vote. Add the dead voters and the disputed Gelbfish signature, and the picture is one of a petition drive that was either spectacularly careless or something worse.
Good-government groups in New York are not mincing words. Grace Rauh, executive director of Citizens Union, told the Post:
"We see signatures get invalidated in races on a regular basis but the fact that 90% of them have been invalidated is just a stunningly high number."
Rauh added that the case "merits additional investigation and some real scrutiny to see what was going on here. It's bewildering because it's so vast."
Alex Camarda, senior policy adviser for the watchdog group Reinvent Albany, echoed that assessment. He said the collective weight of the irregularities "certainly raises a lot of questions and should be investigated by the Board of Elections."
The question is whether anyone will actually investigate. A BOE spokesperson told the Post that the board does not independently conduct investigations into fraudulent claims. The spokesperson did not say whether any potential case would be referred to the Brooklyn District Attorney's Office.
That gap, between the scale of the problem and the apparent lack of any enforcement mechanism, is a familiar one. Across the country, cases of unlawful ballot activity keep surfacing, and the institutional response often amounts to a shrug.
Sharon Gelbfish, daughter of the 99-year-old Lucia Gelbfish, told the Post her mother did not sign the petition. She said learning about the forgery would make her mother's "blood pressure would go through the roof."
Her broader frustration landed harder than any policy paper could.
"I was a little incensed only because years ago you didn't hear things like this. This is our democracy nowadays. It's very sad."
That line, "this is our democracy nowadays", captures something real. When a 99-year-old woman's name is slapped onto a political document she never touched, and when dead people are made to endorse candidates from beyond the grave, ordinary voters are right to wonder who is minding the store.
Mirville-Shahzada denied that her staff "would have done anything" improper and said they "knocked on every door." She did not provide a fuller official comment to the Post. Sources told the paper she has filed paperwork to challenge the BOE's decision in court.
Her rival in the Democratic primary, Chris McCreight, chief of staff to former City Councilman Justin Brannan, was blunt in his assessment:
"This is why people lose faith in government, because you have people running for office who are willing to lie and cheat because they can't compete by following the rules."
McCreight added: "It's dead wrong and should not be tolerated when anybody, of any party, does it."
The district stretching from Coney Island to Bay Ridge has about 85,000 registered voters. Registered Democrats outnumber Republicans by nearly two to one, with roughly 19,000 Republicans and independents outnumbering even that GOP total. Republican Assemblyman Alec Brook-Krasny currently holds the seat and faced no challenge for the GOP nomination. The general election is set for November 3.
The political dynamics make the Democratic primary the real contest, which is exactly why the integrity of the petitioning process matters so much. When the gateway to the ballot is this porous, the voters who play by the rules are the ones who pay the price.
Election-integrity advocates have long warned that the petition process in New York is ripe for abuse. Candidates need 500 valid signatures to qualify for an Assembly race. That is not a high bar. Yet Mirville-Shahzada submitted more than ten times the minimum, and still could not clear it honestly, if the BOE's findings hold up.
The sheer volume of bad signatures raises questions that go beyond one candidate. Who collected these names? Did anyone verify that the signers were alive, registered, and living in the district? And if the BOE lacks the authority to investigate fraud on its own, who does?
These are not abstract concerns. Disputes over fraud enforcement have become a recurring flashpoint in states across the country, with officials often claiming credit for crackdowns while the actual mechanisms remain weak.
In New York, the mechanism appears to be nonexistent. The BOE counts signatures and throws out bad ones. But when signatures belong to dead people, voters who died fifteen years ago, that is not a clerical error. That is either fabrication or a system so broken that no one bothers to check whether the person holding the pen has a pulse.
Meanwhile, political leaders elsewhere have tried to shape fraud narratives to their advantage while doing little to fix the underlying vulnerabilities. The Brooklyn case is a reminder that the problem is not theoretical.
The court review of the remaining 34 signatures will determine whether Mirville-Shahzada stays on the ballot. If enough are found to be forgeries, she's out. If they survive scrutiny, she squeaks through with the bare minimum, a candidacy built on a foundation that even sympathetic observers call "bewildering."
Either way, the broader question lingers. When Democratic officials face fraud-related scrutiny, the institutional response too often defaults to procedural hand-washing rather than genuine accountability. The BOE won't investigate. The DA's office hasn't been asked. And the candidate says her team knocked on every door, a claim that sits uneasily next to 3,000 signatures from people who don't live in the district and two from people who don't live at all.
Kings County Supreme Court holds the immediate answer. The 34 signatures under review will either save Mirville-Shahzada's candidacy or end it before a single primary vote is cast.
But the larger failure belongs to a system that treats petition fraud as someone else's problem. The BOE says it doesn't investigate. The DA hasn't been formally asked. The candidate denies wrongdoing. And two dead Brooklyn residents, gone since 2010, were made to sign their names in fresh ink last month.
Sharon Gelbfish had it right. This is our democracy nowadays. The question is whether anyone in charge plans to do something about it, or whether the dead will just keep voting in Brooklyn until somebody notices enough to care.
