Incumbent Wins by 3: Question Count in ‘768’ Vote

Incumbent Wins by 3

Question Count in '768' Vote

When election ballots were tallied Dec. 27 for Health Service Employees Local 768 of District Council 37, the local's election committee halted the count with incumbent President Darryl Ramsey leading by 10 votes over challenger Fitz Reid, stating that 21 unopened ballots came from nonmembers.

DARRYL RAMSEY: Squeaks to victory. Mr. Reid's side protested, and it was agreed to count eight additional ballots. Seven of them were cast in Mr. Reid's favor, cutting Mr. Ramsey's lead to four votes.

Race Tightened Again

This, too, was protested by Mr. Reid and his supporters, and so the eligibility question for the 13 persons whose votes still hadn't been tallied was taken up again at a Jan. 19 meeting conducted by the American Arbitration Association, which handled the ballot-count. The local's election committee stated then that three more ballots were deemed to come from members in good standing. When they were opened, two of them were cast for Mr. Reid, cutting Mr. Ramsey's lead to three votes.

At that point, according to Mr. Reid, election committee members stated that the remaining 10 ballots, all from city employees who like Mr. Reid are Public Health Sanitarians employed by the Health Department, were not valid because those employees had never joined the local. (Mr. Ramsey is employed by Kings County Hospital.) Those employees were deemed agency shop fee payers - persons who pay the equivalent of union dues but do not have the right to vote in officer elections.

FITZ REID: Voter rolls manipulated. When one of them, Dameon D. Whyte, produced a card designating him a member in good standing from Local 768's international union, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, it was disallowed by election committee chair Beatrice Everett, on the grounds that he was on the local's list of agency shop fee payers. According to Mr. Reid, Ms. Everett also stated that the vote would not matter, since it would still leave Mr. Ramsey leading by two votes.

Ramsey Prevails

And so on Jan. 23, the Local 768 election committee presented the results as final, with the 10 votes by Mr. Reid's fellow Public Health Sanitarians still sitting in unopened envelopes. By a vote of 65-55, the members in attendance accepted the committee's report, giving Mr. Ramsey another three-year term as president.

Three days later, Mr. Reid said in a phone interview that he would appeal the ruling to AFSCME, and if he did not get satisfaction there, planned to bring the matter to court. He contended that the election committee, like a football team calculating how to run out the clock to preserve a slim lead, had stopped counting ballots each time it seemed Mr. Ramsey was in danger of losing.

Mr. Reid invoked the recent sordid past of DC 37, in which ballot chicanery tainted numerous locals' officer elections and, most infamously, led to the ratification of the union's wage contract a decade ago in a rigged vote.

After the president of another DC 37 local who was a leader of the vote-fixing confessed to prosecutors in the Manhattan District Attorney's Office, more than two dozen union officials were convicted of corruption charges. Among them was Mr. Ramsey's predecessor as Local 768 president, Helen Greene, who pleaded guilty to a lesser offense after being indicted for allegedly charging thousands of dollars in personal expenses to her union credit card. It was also revealed that the officials involved in fixing the DC 37 contract vote had falsified the tally in Local 768, although apparently without Ms. Greene's knowledge.

"The District Council is still manipulating elections," Mr. Reid asserted. "They used to switch ballots in the envelopes. What they do now is they switch the listing of who's eligible. They can keep your name on the membership list, they can keep your name on the agency shop list, or they keep some of them on both lists."

Calls to Mr. Ramsey, Ms. Everett and Eddie Demmings, the DC 37 general counsel who was present during the initial vote count, were not returned.

Local Suppressing Vote?

Mr. Reid claimed that roughly 700 members of Local 768 were listed as agency fee payers - better than 20 percent of the 3,300 city workers under the local's banner. He said he believed that the union's leadership did not actively solicit employees in titles it represented to sign membership cards, since this allowed it to better control who was entitled to vote while still receiving the equivalent of dues from nonmembers.

Local 768 does not enforce its constitutional requirements regarding eligibility at most membership meetings, Mr. Reid said. Those coming to the meetings need only to produce their city identification cards to be admitted, allowing agency fee payers to vote on other issues without being checked.

Unless Mr. Reid's appeal succeeds, however, Mr. Ramsey will maintain his power by the narrowest of margins. He will be governing at somewhat of a disadvantage, however, since the rest of the local's top officers were elected from Mr. Reid's slate.