EDITOR'S NOTE: Dan Clark is with NY NOW
New York state will not hold a primary election for president this year after commissioners on the state Board of Elections decided to remove Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-VT, from the ballot and cancel the contest.
The election had been postponed until June 23, the same day as the state’s primary races for Congress and the state Legislature, but now won’t take place at all.
Sanders and former Vice President Joe Biden were the remaining candidates on the ticket for the June contest. With Sanders now out of the race, and backing Biden, the commissioners said the election was no longer necessary.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo, the de facto head of the Democratic Party in New York, said Monday that he didn’t have a position on the decision.
“I’m not going to second guess the Board of Elections,” Cuomo said. “I know there are a lot of election employees ... who are nervous about conducting elections, but I’ll leave it to the Board of Elections.”
Language was included in this year's state budget, approved in early April, to allow the Board of Elections to remove candidates from the ballot who've suspended their campaigns. Sanders, who dropped out of the race earlier this month, falls into that camp.
The Sanders campaign, over the weekend, had asked the commissioners to leave him on the ballot and allow the election to proceed. Cancelling the contest, they wrote, would stoke division within the party.
Jeff Weaver, a senior adviser to the Sanders campaign, said in a statement later Monday that the decision from the state Board of Elections should be overturned by the Democratic National Committee. The decision, he said, could set a precedent that would support a delay of this year's general election.
"New York has clearly violated its approved delegate selection plan," Weaver said. "If this is not remedied, New York should lose all its delegates to the 2020 Democratic National Convention and there should be a broader review by the Democratic Party of New York's checkered pattern of voter disenfranchisement."