Three Factions Contest For The Soul of Brighton
A primer on “What Is The Brighton Democratic Committee” may be found here.
In 2022, progressive Democrats ran a counterpetitioning campaign in the Town of Brighton, triggering primary elections in four (4) election districts: ED4, ED5, ED13, and ED28.
The runup to these campaigns had featured considerable political drama. In October 2021, Monroe County Legislature candidate Rajesh Barnabas had tried to join the Committee under a process provided for in its bylaws. Customarily, this process is free of controversy. But for Rajesh that day, he was subjected to a 20-minute interrogation, led by senior Democrats such as former Town Supervisor Sandy Frankel and current Town Supervisor Bill Moehle. When the leaders of a Committee make their position known, the body tends to vote accordingly, and to its enduring shame, the Committee voted against adding Mr. Barnabas, who would have meaningfully improved the Committee’s dismal diversity.
A few months later, Mr. Barnabas was one of 4 candidates who petitioned themselves on in his home election district (ED5), triggering a primary election. This petitioning process, required for all current BDC members to continue their membership into the fall, also can serve as a way for Democrats to invite themselves onto the Committee without seeking its permission. If more than 4 Democrats are petitioned on in a given election district, the Board of Elections will administer a primary election in that ED and the top four (4) vote-getters are seated on the Committee. Importantly, the petitioning process is the only one formally provided for in New York State Election Law.
On June 28, 2022, Rajesh’s Democratic neighbors voted in the primary and he decisively won the election:
Due to the election summarized above, incumbent Committee members David Friedman and John Osowski were ineligible to participate in the fall organizing meeting of the Brighton Democratic Committee, and had to await the Committee’s pleasure to later re-join via the bylaws process.
A similar story occurred in the 13th Election District, where incumbent BDC member Sean Singh asked Town Leader Barbara Moehle to assign him to his home district because, as a person of color, he felt more comfortable gathering petition signatures in his own neighborhood, where people know him. According to Sean, Barbara told him “I don’t know what to say to that. I haven’t heard of that before.” Listen to Sean’s comments at the May 16, 2022 BDC meeting:
Similar stories underpin the other progressive candidates who were petitioned on in Brighton, and the literature that was distributed in support of their election specifically cited “reforming the local Democratic Party to be more inclusive, diverse and equitable.”
All of this background serves as context for the 2024 primary election, where no fewer than fourteen (14) EDs are being contested across Brighton!
When the petitioning window opened in 2024, the landscape had changed considerably. Most importantly, during a redistricting process the Board of Elections had reduced the number of EDs in Brighton from 52 to 38, hence reducing the maximum size of the Committee from 208 to 152. Since there were more than 170 members, and more being added every month, the Committee was due a reckoning: assuming everyone wanted to continue into the fall, there simply would not be room for every incumbent Committee member.
At the February 2024 meeting, Town Leader Barbara Moehle, the spouse of Town Supervisor Bill Moehle, told the Committee that it was the “Leader’s prerogative” to design the petitions that would determine who represented which part of Brighton.
At the same meeting, she complained that it had taken four (4) 12-hour days to pore over the Committee lists and decide who would remain on the Committee; who would be tacitly invited to drop off the Committee; and which part of Brighton each Committee member would represent.
The choices made by Ms. Moehle do not follow a consistent pattern. Generally, she appeared to favor incumbent members, but she excluded some longtime members who had been active – presumably because they were affiliated with Justice In Action. She took measures to ensure that formal support was granted to brand-new BDC members such as Jewish Federation CEO Meredith Dragon, Jewish Federation President Dan Kinel and his wife Ellen Poleshuck, and other notable supporters of right-wing Israeli politics such as Aileen Koffman. Ms. Dragon and Ms. Koffman, in particular, have engaged in social media attacks on Brighton Town Councilmember Robin Wilt for her advocacy on behalf of Palestinian human rights, with Ms. Dragon intimating that Ms. Wilt has ties to the terrorist organization Hamas. In ED10, Ms. Moehle included someone who moved to Brighton from Illinois in March 2021, and who joined the Committee in January 2024. In a Committee with ample room for participants, it makes sense to welcome new members of the community, but when the Committee is slated to be reduced in size by 27%, such choices invite scrutiny. In sum, even after the contested primaries in 2022, Ms. Moehle made no changes to the opaque and undemocratic process by which she designed the Committee petitions.
After what had happened in 2022, it should not have come as a surprise to Ms. Moehle that some Democratic Committee members would take exception to her assignments and petition themselves on in other districts. As shown by BOE documentation, candidates were petitioned on in EDs throughout Brighton. The document is a bit hard to follow, because it sometimes lists candidates more than once; and it has columns that document maneuvers such as objections (when the legitimacy of the signatures submitted for a given candidate is being challenged), declinations (when a candidate formally notifies BOE they are not running in a specified district), and substitutions (when a Committee to Fill Vacancies substitutes someone in place of a candidate who is no longer eligible to run).
All told, besides Ms. Moehle’s slate of 148 candidates, dozens of additional candidates were petitioned on: EDs 1, 3, 4, 5, 10, 11, 13, 14, 15, 17, 18, 20, 22, 26, 28, 29, 32, 34, 35, 36, and 37 all had “unauthorized” petitioning activity occur. Formal objections were filed in EDs 3, 4, 17, 20, 26, and 29.
The ED29 objections against former State Senator Richard Dollinger’s petitions were ruled invalid, due to the objection not bearing the correct address of the objector. In ED26, Town Leader Barbara Moehle organized objections to disqualify Brighton Town Councilmember Robin Wilt and her husband Nicholas Wilt from the Committee – a perverse action, given that Ms. Wilt is an incumbent elected official and the incoming State Committee member for the 136th Assembly District. Considering Ms. Moehle’s fanatical defense of incumbency for other Democrats, including Committee members, her attempt to disqualify a 7-year incumbent Town Councilmember deserves to be scrutinized. She must know it is not a good look, because she has denied knowing that the Wilts were incoming to the ED in question, but the envelope she used to serve notice of the Specific Objections is dated after the Wilts’ substitutions were filed:
Ms. Moehle’s objections to the Wilts’ signatures were ruled invalid, but her attempt to disqualify Robin Wilt from the Brighton Democratic Committee is writ indelibly in the annals of history.
In other EDs 3, 17, and 20, successful objections disqualified various candidates supported by a coalition led by Sanjay Hiranandani and Brighton Town Councilmember Nate Salzman: Caroline Korn, Lauren Deutsch, Sanjay Hiranandani, and Sharon Gray in ED3; Jacqueline and Wayne Lipschitz and Tiffany Rothenberg in ED17; and Dan Kinel and his wife Ellen Poleshuck and Emily Minerva in ED20. Mr. Salzman’s counterpetitioning campaign against Justice In Action endorsed candidates, however, was successful in petitioning slates on in EDs 15, 34, 35, and 36. The ties to Hiranandani and Salzman are established by the Committee to Fill Vacancies on the petitions in question, of which Hiranandani was the first named, and the prime facie sheet filled out by Salzman when he submitted the petitions to the Board of Elections:
Perverse side observations, noted here for posterity:
- incumbent BDC member Aron Reina was assigned to ED32, but in addition to gathering signatures for the assigned slate, he gathered thirty (30) signatures in his home ED13, where he won the primary election in 2022. Mr. Reina then submitted a declination in ED13, invalidating the hard work he’d invested in gathering 30 signatures!
- In ED17, incumbent member Ed Premo, in a fit of pique after discovering that a petition was being circulated that did not include his name, gathered 45 signatures for the assigned slate (he only needed 17), then signed a petition for an opposing slate submitted by Mr. Salzman. Fortunately for Mr. Premo, successful objections forestalled the primary election that he triggered against himself.
All of this petitioning and counterpetitioning activity did not go unnoticed by BDC leadership, and at the April 15 meeting, Town Leader Barbara Moehle excoriated Justice In Action for their activity. She made no mention of Mr. Reina, Mr. Hiranandani, Mr. Salzman, or the other actors who had engaged in the same behavior, nor did she give a comprehensive list of incumbent members impacted by primary elections.
To correct the record, a letter was sent to all present and incoming members of the Brighton Democratic Committee, inviting them to an April 25 presentation promising a “Complete and Accurate Account” of the petitioning process. The day before the meeting, Town Leader Moehle sent the below email to a subset of the Committee, pointedly excluding most Justice In Action members. The email attempts to rationalize the process she had followed, denies knowing about the Wilts’ having substituted in ED26 before filing her objections, and prevaricates about having used the word “prerogative,” preferring the word “responsibility.”
To understand the mendacity of Ms. Moehle’s claim that she did not know she was objecting to Town Councilmember Robin Wilt’s candidacy for the Brighton Democratic Committee, it is important to understand that the objections process is conducted in two phases: “General Objections” do little more than identify an objector, while “Specific Objections” (sometimes known as “specifications of objections”) are filed later by the objector, and detail exactly which signatures are being challenged and why. It is common for General Objections to be filed, to buy the objector some time, and for no Specific Objections to be filed if the petition is deemed viable by the objector. This year in Brighton, General Objections were filed in EDs 18 and 34 without being followed by Specific Objections.
The timelines Ms. Moehle is referencing in her email are clearly delineated in the BOE document: General Objections were filed on April 5; declinations of 3 candidates were filed on April 5 and 8; the Wilts filed their substitutions on April 9; and Ms. Moehle mailed her Specific Objections on April 10. Before the Wilts filed their substitutions, 3 of the 4 slots in the ED were vacant, i.e. Ms. Moehle’s objections were solely to the candidacy of Erica Bryant, the former D&C journalist. Given the two-stage objections process and the timelines, Ms. Moehle’s claim that she did not know she was objecting to the Wilts’ candidacies strains credulity.
The April 25 presentation is archived on YouTube:
Highlights (or lowlights) of the presentation include Town Councilmember Christine Corrado giving a wildly inaccurate recounting of the LD24 race that Rajesh Barnabas contested in 2022, repeatedly saying he’d promised not to contest a primary. A detailed account of that primary is given elsewhere on this Web site: LD24: The Untold Story. Notably, Ms. Corrado said nothing about Jewish Federation CEO Meredith Dragon’s social media attacks on her fellow Town Councilmember Robin Wilt. Additionally in the video, Sanjay Hiranandani recounts how difficult it was to gather signatures in his assigned ED, sounding eerily similar to Sean Singh describing why Mr. Singh felt more comfortable gathering signatures in his own neighborhood. In the end, Mr. Hiranandani did petition himself and his wife on in his home ED, and no primary is scheduled to occur there because the Wilts filed declinations.
Finally, Ed Premo describes how he facilitated a primary election against himself, in retribution for having been omitted from a petition being circulated by others.
With the stage set, there are fourteen (14) EDs with primary elections slated to occur on June 25. Three authorized multi-candidate committees are working to support these campaigns: Democrats For Brighton is working on behalf of Ms. Moehle’s candidates who had no Committee to Fill Vacancies; Justice For Brighton is working on behalf of candidates whose Committee to Fill Vacancies was led by Nicholas Wilt; and the newly-formed Friends of Brighton Democrats is working on behalf of candidates whose Committee to Fill Vacancies was led by Sanjay Hiranandani. The address on record for Friends of Brighton Democrats is Mr. Hiranandani’s home address.
Democrats for Brighton and Friends of Brighton Democrats must be working together closely, because a mailer sent by Friends of Brighton Democrats was sent from the Democrats for Brighton address.
A complete list of candidates is listed here:
| ED | JfB | DfB | Friends of BD |
| 1 | Manish Dixit Tyelise Dorsey-Patros | Iris Bieri Elaine McVicar Daniel Proctor Jeanne Proctor | |
| 5 | Rajesh Barnabas Danielle Fraenkel Rachael Hittinger Kathryn Kubiak-Rizzoe | Barbara Moehle Bill Moehle | |
| 10 | Johnita Anthony Andrew Gefell | Andrew Gefell Deborah Kornfeld Frances Reed Amy Stockwell | |
| 11 | Laurie Fellows Alvin “Dwain” Wilder Julie Clayton | Christopher Kvam Shawn McConnell | |
| 14 | Shubhangi Gandhi Bruce Conrad-Reingold | Maria Fisher Marilyn Rosen Michael Pollock Tara Anacker | |
| 15 | Amy Toric Julie Gelfand Stephen Piper | Beverly Wing Michael Rothenberg | |
| 18 | Michael Argaman | Meredith Dragon Nate Salzman Samantha Parisi Clara Sanguinetti | |
| 22 | Tori Madway Beverley Pringle Wynette Vickers | Holm Bussler John Osowski Martha Osowski | |
| 28 | James Berger Dawn Botting Linda Edwards Jane van Dis | Brendon Fleming Elliot Roberts Gail Seigel | |
| 29 | Christopher Ross Alison Monte Brandy Young-Gqamana Elizabeth Peterdy | Richard Dollinger | |
| 32 | Grant Atkins Niema Atkins Serina Tetenov | Christine Corrado Andrew Green Michael Harren Aron Reina | |
| 34 | Sarah Johnston Thatcher Lyman Daniel Simpson Joshusa Owens | Aileen Koffman Benjamin Koffman Dylan Feliciano Eliran Fischer | |
| 35 | Erin Egloff Alii Farrell Kyla Farrell Samiha Islam | Cynthia Ratajczak Susan Korpeck | Cynthia Ratajczak Susan Korpeck Gitana Mirochnik Daniella Vatch |
| 36 | Renee Coleman Matthias Lalisse Jeffrey Mehr Alexei Tetenov | Amit Sud Rajashree Bhagwat Saniya Bhagwat Seth Fruiterman |