Christopher Marte, an erstwhile challenger to incumbent Margaret Chin for the Democratic Party nomination to represent Lower Manhattan in the City Council, has announced that he will continue to be a candidate for the office, running in the general election under the banner of the Independence Party.
Mr. Marte was Ms. Chin’s closest rival in the Democratic primary, held on September 12. Preliminary vote counts (5220 for Ms. Chin, and 5020 for Mr. Marte) had originally put him within 200 votes of tying her. But in the week that followed, further counting of absentee, affidavit, and military ballots widened Ms. Chin’s margin to a surplus of 222 votes (5,363 votes for the incumbent, and 5,141 for the challenger), effectively scuttling Mr. Marte’s hope of securing the Democratic Party nomination.
But the additional vote counting that began on September 18 and ended on September 26 also yielded a surprise result: five write-in voters had cast their ballots for Mr. Marte, under the line of the Independence Party, rather than the Democratic Party. A total of only 23 votes were cast for any candidate under the Independence Party line, and eight of these were deemed to be “unattributable,” with one more ruled to be “unrecorded.”
(“Unattributable” ballots occur when a write-in vote is so illegible that Board of Elections examiners are unable determine whom the voter intended to support. “Unrecorded” ballots result from any of several kinds of irregularities. Many of these arise from voters incorrectly marking the ballot form — for example, by circling a candidate’s name, rather than filling in the oval next to that name, or filling in ovals beside the names of multiple candidates. Another tranche of “unrecorded” ballots are votes cast correctly, but by people who are not eligible to vote, such as those who reside at addresses outside the First Council district, or those who are not registered with the party in whose primary they have attempted to vote.)
Once the “unattributable” and “unrecorded” votes were removed from the Independence Party tally, a total of 14 legitimate votes remained for all the candidates. Of these 14, Mr. Marte garnered five, while Ms. Chin got four. As a result, Mr. Marte became the de facto nominee of the Independence Party. For the next week, he weighed his options. On Wednesday morning, he announced that he would accept the Independence Party nomination, and continue his campaign through the November 7 general election.
“We can’t give up the fight for the future of our district,” he said. “Our community still has reason to hope for change, and I see it as my obligation to continue to the general election.”
The road ahead presents more than a few challenges for Mr. Marte. The first among these will be to get his name on the ballot, so that he does not have to rely on supporters casting write-in votes. A preliminary list of candidates for the November election, published Wednesday by the City’s Board of Elections includes the names of Ms. Chin (as the candidate of both the Democratic and Working Families Parties), Bryan Jung (the Republican nominee), and Aaron Foldenauer, another of Ms. Chin’s rivals for the Democratic Party nomination, who is now running under the banner of the Liberal Party. But this list does not contain Mr. Marte’s name. He insisted, however, that, “my name will be on the ballot as the candidate, as I have already accepted the Independence Party nomination. We were the only campaign that the Board of Elections certified on Wednesday, and they didn’t update it until after they sent out the contest list.”
More broadly, although the vote in November will ultimately determine who represents Lower Manhattan in the City Council for the next four years, amid the heavily “blue” landscape of Lower Manhattan, the nomination of the Democratic party is usually tantamount to winning the general election, which usually makes the primary the real contest, with the actual election relegated to the status of a formality.
That noted, Mr. Marte — a social media consultant who was born and raised on Rivington Street to parents who had emigrated from the Dominican Republic, and was grew up working in his father’s bodega — waged a spirited campaign. At the start of the race, Mr. Marte was a virtual unknown outside of the Lower East Side neighborhood where he cut his teeth, coming to political activism as a teenager by fighting to preserve community gardens created on empty land. Building on this base, he accumulated a slew of endorsements and came surprisingly close to denying the Democratic nomination to an established incumbent. All which appears to be that Mr. Marte has a serious future in Lower Manhattan politics. Whether 2017 will turn out to be his year, however, remains to be seen.