Following a ruling by the Westchester County Board of Elections, Mitch Benson will not be able to challenge for the Republican nomination for district attorney, ending his plans of a primary battle against GOP frontrunner Bruce Bendish.
The Board of Elections requires potential candidates for elections to submit petitions from registered voters within the party whose line they are seeking to run on. Both Benson and Bendish surpassed the 2,000-signature requirement, but on Aug. 3, the county Board of Elections found more than 1,000 of Benson’s 2,700 signatures to be invalid.
Benson filed a lawsuit with the Westchester Supreme Court in attempt to validate his petition, and even though the court reinstated some of the grieved signatures, it wasn’t enough for him to meet the requirement to appear on the primary ballot.
Doug Colety, commissioner of the county Board of Elections, said the Judge Bruce Tolbert—alongside attorneys for Benson, Bendish and the Board of Elections—went through Benson’s petition line by line for three days, by which time it became “mathematically impossible” for him to meet the requirement threshold.
“The majority of [the challenges to Benson’s petition] pertained to people not registered to vote, people not enrolled in the Republican Party and defective witnesses’ petition statements,” Colety told the Review.
Bendish submitted more than 4,000 signatures to the Board of Elections following his endorsement by the county GOP at the party’s nominating convention in April. At the convention, Bendish also received nearly 75 percent of votes from Republican delegates.
Following the court’s decision, Benson said, “While I disagree with certain discretionary and technical determinations which invalidated hundreds of signatures, I recognize it is part of the political process and within the authority of the Board of Elections and the court to make the decisions they did.”
Now, Bendish, 69, will begin his general election campaign against Democratic candidate Anthony Scarpino.
“We’re comfortable that we put this primary question behind us,” Bendish told the Review. “We’re all gearing up for the November election. We’re prepared for it.”
Bendish, who is running with the slogan “Experience Matters,” has served as assistant district attorney in Westchester for 14 years. During that time, he also served as the head of the county’s homicide bureau.
Scarpino, 64, is a former Westchester County Court judge and a New York state Supreme Court justice.
