A bitter ballot fight in a Queens Democratic primary is set to move to court Thursday as incumbent Assembly Member Jenifer Rajkumar faces a court challenge alleging forged signatures were used to secure her place on the June ballot.
A Board of Elections clerks’ review found that Rajkumar submitted 2,558 signatures for the Democratic primary in the 38th Assembly District and retained 1,494 valid signatures after 1,064 were invalidated on ordinary election-law grounds. The threshold for ballot access is 500 signatures.
But the same clerks’ report also said 1,168 forgery objections were “not ruled upon for lack of jurisdiction,” leaving the central fraud claims unresolved as the dispute heads before a judge.
The court challenge came from Rajkumar’s challenger, David Orkin, a member of the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, who is seeking to invalidate her designating petition and block her name from appearing on the Democratic primary ballot.
Orkin’s petition alleges that Rajkumar’s filing was invalid for multiple reasons, including insufficient valid signatures, altered dates and witness statements, unregistered or out-of-district signers, and what they describe as multiple forged signatures.
The petition identifies nine specific signatures that it says were forged and argues that the problem extended well beyond those examples. It names seven subscribing witnesses and alleges that fraud permeated the petition pages they handled, which the filing claims account for more than 70% of the submitted signatures.
A Queens Supreme Court judge signed an order to show cause on April 17, allowing the case to proceed on an expedited basis. The order directed the Board of Elections to make related records available and expressly allowed petitioners to submit additional evidence on fraud, forgery, candidate ineligibility, and other alleged illegality.
DSA member David Orkin is primarying AM Jenifer Rajkumar in the 38th Assembly District. Photo via David4Queens Instagram.
The clash has also produced dueling public statements from the two campaigns.
Rajkumar, in a social media post and in a subsequent campaign statement, accused “the socialists” of waging a campaign of hate against her and said the clerks’ report showed she had three times the number of signatures needed to qualify. Her campaign called the fraud allegations false and politically motivated. She has represented the district since 2021 and is the first South Asian woman ever elected to the New York State Legislature.
Orkin’s campaign said it found “overwhelming evidence of fraudulent petition signatures” after reviewing Rajkumar’s ballot access petitions and said supporters discovered their names on petition sheets with signatures they said were fake.
After the clerks’ report was issued, the campaign argued that Rajkumar was misleading voters by suggesting the matter had been resolved, saying the Board review addressed technical defects but not fraud.
The clerks’ report shows that the largest categories of invalidated signatures were voters not enrolled in the Democratic Party, voters who were not registered, and voters who lived outside the district.
Even after those invalidations, Rajkumar remained comfortably above the ballot threshold unless the court throws out a substantial number of additional signatures based on the forgery allegations.
In a statement, a spokesperson for Rajkumar claimed that the DSA “got crushed in the field” and was now “embarrassing themselves in court,” calling the case a “frivolous, bad-faith lawsuit” and “a political setup by DSA.”
The spokesperson argued that the challenge was an effort to “manufacture a scandal” out of the nine signatures specifically identified in Orkin’s petition out of the more than 2,600 signatures Rajkumar submitted overall, and said voters would reject what the campaign described as desperate tactics.