Muhammad challenges ballot rejection in 104th Assembly District primary race

Ali T. Muhammad is challenging his removal from the Democratic primary ballot for the 104th Assembly District after state election officials said he fell 19 signatures short of qualifying for the June 23 contest. The district stretches across Orange and Dutchess counties, including the City and Town of Newburgh, Beacon, Poughkeepsie, Plattekill, Marlboro and Lloyd, making the fight directly relevant to Hudson Valley voters who will decide whether incumbent Jonathan Jacobson gets a primary.

Muhammad submitted 652 signatures, but the New York State Board of Elections disqualified enough of them to leave him short of the threshold. Through attorney Michael Sussman, Muhammad is arguing that at least 25 of the rejected signatures should count, which he says would put him back on the ballot. The challenge was filed May 1 in Albany County Supreme Court and asks a judge to undo the board’s ruling.

Jacobson, who has represented Assembly District 104 since 2018 and maintains district offices in Newburgh and Poughkeepsie, said the board found 26 percent of Muhammad’s signatures invalid. He argued that many of the signers were not enrolled Democrats or were not registered voters, a distinction that can decide whether a candidate survives the petition process before voters ever reach the polls.

The dispute goes beyond one candidate and one district. It raises the fairness question that repeatedly hangs over local primaries in New York: whether ballot access rules protect the integrity of elections or narrow the field before the public gets a choice. New York law says a petition filed with election officials is presumptively valid if it appears to contain the required number of properly authenticated signatures, but objections can still strip a candidate from the ballot.

For Muhammad, that process has become familiar. In 2019, the Orange County Board of Elections upheld a challenge to his Democratic nominating petition in his Newburgh mayoral race and threw out 117 of 341 signatures. He needed 259 valid signatures from registered party members. Muhammad stayed in that race as an Independent and lost to Torrance Harvey, 1,569 to 529.

Two years later, a State Supreme Court justice ruled that Muhammad could not appear on the Democratic Party line in his challenge to Orange County Executive Steve Neuhaus. Now, with the primary set for June 23 and the general election scheduled for November 3, the latest petition fight again puts the power of election-law objections at the center of Hudson Valley politics, where a stack of signatures can determine who gets to compete and who never reaches the ballot.