Bart Haggerty

Insurgent Republican activist Bart Haggerty filed a lawsuit yesterday in Albany County Supreme Court against the Queens County Republican Organization stemming from their re-organizational meeting, which was held two weeks ago today.

Haggerty filed a similar lawsuit in 2005 and lost.

So, I wondered, how is this different?

“That’s actually a good question,” Haggerty told me when I reached him just now.

“The last lawsuit didn’t include an adoption of rules,” he said. “They essentially had the same rules in 2003 that they did in 2005.”

This year, “They did not engage in mass disqualifications the way that Serph [Maltese] did in 2005. They opted for different methods of affecting the outcome,” Haggerty said. That change, he said, was not announcing in advance the new rules used to count the votes.

It’s sort of complicated, but this local paper has a good over view of vote in question.

The fact the suit was filed in Albany is also interesting, since the judges there shouldn't have too much of a connection to the local activists on either side of the case.

A Republican source who spent the night counting votes in Queens says that borough’s Republican County Leader, Phil Ragusa, was re-elected, despite a spirited challenge from the faction led by insurgent Bart Haggerty.

The vote, according to one person who was there, was approximately 76 percent for Ragusa and 24 percent for Haggerty, who has waged an interesting battle against the Queens GOP establishment.

(The formula for calculating the votes is a bit complicated. Each Assembly District has a weighted vote depending on the percentage of votes it got in the last gubernatorial election. That percentage is then split 50-50 between two groups. One group is the two district leaders in each AD. The other group consists of the County Committee members within the AD, which vary and can go up to as many as 200 people.)

Anyway, Queens has the largest number of registered Republican voters in the city and control of that county organization is a coveted prize on that side of the aisle. Remember, it’s where Michael Bloomberg’s 2005 Republican primary challenger, Tom Ognibene, came from.

The meeting, held in Glendale, ran late and a number of people who stayed till the end and know exactly what happened are still waking up. More details when they get their coffee.

Councilman Dennis Gallagher, who was indicted for rape earlier this year, came in last place in a race to become a Republican judicial delegate in the Queens district he’s represented since 2001.

 

The unofficial results for the three positions there, according to the city Board of Elections, are:

John Haggerty-320

Marguerite Adams-319

Matt Hunter-258

Bart Bruno-235

Richard Metzger-290

Dennis Gallagher-207

It’s little bit of a blow for organization Republicans, some of whom hoped Gallagher could run to keep the state Senate seat there in Republicans hands. And the top voter-getter in this obscure race was John Haggerty, who, along with his brother, Bart, have been waging a years-long war against county leaders Phil Ragusa and his predecessor, Serph Maltese.

(I’m still waiting to get results on Gallagher’s re-election bid for his County Committee position).

While Ragusa won his race for State County Committee (which functions the same as being a district leader in other counties), another Maltese ally was knocked off the ballot and another is trailing by 28 votes.

Marguerite Adams – executive vice president of the Queens GOP and a senior member of the state committee – is trailing in her State County Committee race to Haggerty ally Virginia Donnelly by 28 votes, according to Bart Haggerty.

Another Maltese ally, Karyn Peterson, was knocked off the ballot and replaced by Janice Bar, Haggerty said.

You know things have gotten weird in a small local primary when Republicans start putting images of Charlie Rangel on their literature.

This piece, which I heard is circulating in Queens, is linking the Queens County Republican Chairman, Phil Ragusa, to Rangel, who thinks Dick Cheney has mental problems.

The mail piece references a 2002 donation of $1000 that Ragusa made to Rangel’s committee and notes that Rangel help engineer the Democratic takeover of congress in last year’s election.

Ragusa, a CPA, is running this year for a male-designated state Republican committee post in the 26th Assembly District. The only other candidate for that slot is Peter Boudouvas, an aide to Republican state Senator Frank Padavan.

The mail may not derail’s Ragusa’s election to that position tomorrow, but it’s certain to fuel the seemingly endless fight for control of the Queens G.O.P. county organization, which has been going on for years and involves technical election law stuff I don't entirely understand. (Critics like John and Bart Haggerty--with the help of Democratic election lawyer Martin Connor--say the way the county counts votes is screwy.)

Credit for kicking off this latest skirmish goes to former congressional candidate-turned-blogger Jun Policarpio, who wrote about the Rangel donation about a week ago.  read more »