Assembly Member Malliotakis (photo: @NMalliotakis)
Assembly Member Nicole Malliotakis, a Republican mayoral candidate who represents a district spanning parts of Staten Island and Southern Brooklyn, says on her newly launched campaign website that the last time she was reelected to the state Legislature, in 2016, she received 100 percent of the vote. The claim does not match voting records.
Malliotakis has been reelected to the state Assembly three times over the last six years after first winning her seat in 2010, when she beat two-term incumbent Democrat Janele Hyer-Spencer. Malliotakis’ mayoral campaign website proclaims this fact proudly under the banner “Proven Winner.”
“Nicole Malliotakis was elected to the State Assembly on November 2, 2010, defeating a two-term incumbent with 55% of the vote,” that section reads. “She was re-elected 3 times in her district which covers Brooklyn and Staten Island, with 61%, 73% and 100% of the vote consecutively. Nicole is determined to bring common sense and accountability to our government.”
Malliotakis ran unopposed last year, on four ballot lines -- the Republican, Conservative, Independence and Reform party lines -- with no Democratic opponent. Of the 46,163 applicable ballots cast in the district in November, according to the New York City Board of Elections, 34,533 were for Malliotakis. Of those who did not select Malliotakis, more than 11,000 were left blank for her race, likely attributable to voters who showed up for the presidential election but chose not to vote down ballot. Of votes cast for the 64th Assembly District, Malliotakis', she did receive 98.8 percent, not quite the 100 percent she claims. Including those who opted not to vote in her race, the percentage drops to 74.8 of voters in the district who showed up to the polls and cast a ballot.
Hundreds of those who did vote in Malliotakis' race, but not for her, cast write-ins, including several for local Democrat Justin Brannan, who is now running for City Council, certain write-ins for presidential candidates such as Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton, and even gag votes for deceased individuals, such as Elvis Presley, or fictional characters from popular culture, such as Tywin Lannister from Game of Thrones. Write-in votes are not officially counted unless an individual registers as a write-in candidate.
With those calculations, the campaign’s numbers from past elections also seem marginally skewed. In her 2014 run, the website states she received 73 percent of the vote when in fact she received 71.1 percent (15,051 votes out of 21,147 applicable ballots). In 2012, her first reelection, she claims 61 percent support, when Board of Election results show 55.7 percent (21,173 votes out of 38,004 applicable ballots).
Even in 2010, the year Malliotakis first took elected office by beating the Democratic incumbent, her total vote tally was 52.2 percent (13,944 votes out of 26,705), marginally less than the 55 percent she claims on her website.
When asked for clarity, Leticia Remauro, a spokesperson for Malliotakis’s mayoral campaign, indicated that they did not account for unrecorded votes, which the state Board of Elections includes in its vote tallies. Even with unrecorded votes excluded, Malliotakis did not reach 100 percent of the vote last year. By that math she received 34,533 out of 34,932 votes, 98.8 percent. After exchanging a few emails with Gotham Gazette on the apparent discrepancies, Remauro finally emailed, “The State BOE is responsible for accounting for all votes that are cast in a election. The NYC BOE reports the votes for the office. We followed all accepted practices for determining percentages...The results we provided are both official and certified.”
Asked for comment, Mollie Fullington, a spokesperson for Paul Massey, Malliotakis’ opponent in the Republican primary race, emailed, “It is unfortunate the Assemblywoman feels the need to inflate her numbers because she lacks the relevant experience to be Mayor of New York.”
This isn’t the first time that Malliotakis has made a claim not backed up by the actual numbers. Last week, in her first television interview since she jumped into the mayoral race, Malliotakis falsly claimed that rape in the city had risen 33 percent under Mayor Bill de Blasio, when in fact the increase was only about 4 percent between 2013, the last year of Mayor Bloomberg’s final term, and 2016, de Blasio’s third year as mayor.
[Read: Mayoral Candidate Malliotakis Falsely Claimed Rape Up 33% Under De Blasio]
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by Samar Khurshid, senior reporter, Gotham Gazette
@samarkhurshid @GothamGazette
Note: this article has been updated to more carefully describe the percentages Malliotakis received in the 2016 vote. Voters who do not choose anyone in a specific race are not typically counted in the outcome of that race.
(image: Stanford)
Government technology practitioners from various cities and countries gathered last week to discuss the future of “smart cities” and the “Internet of Things” at the Smart Cities NYC conference that took place at the Brooklyn Navy Yard.
One panel was moderated by Jeff Merritt, Director of Innovation for the City of New York and a go-to person for smart cities in the local administration, and included technology leaders from four cities -- Chicago, Atlanta, Toronto, and Amsterdam -- who discussed a variety of ongoing projects and future plans. A portion of the discussion focused on the Internet of Things, which generally means a series of interconnected devices with the ability to exchange data. The panel was preceded by a keynote address by Miguel Gamiño, New York City’s Chief Technology Officer.
Merritt led the panelists in a discussion of the importance of changing processes and government operation in the digital era, and making progress in the ability to respond to challenges presented by the new world technological order, which is also constantly evolving. This includes integrating emerging technologies into everyday work, from substituting paper documents with digital to adopting the use of sensors and establishing citywide connectivity. The Internet of Things may be a piece of the puzzle.
“I do think we are at a tipping point,” said Ger Baron, Chief Technology Officer of Amsterdam, Netherlands, referring to the transformation of government, which is essential for adapting to the expanding digital world. Similar to the banking industry that has been adjusting and launching digital services, the government, Baron said, needs to redefine itself and move away from the organization designed 30 or 40 years ago. Government needs to get rid of obsolete procedures and focus on relevant ones, he said.
“This is the moment to start connecting the dots,” Baron said, referring to evaluating lessons from recent years. He added he is optimistic about ongoing initiatives around the world that indicate responsiveness to the need for change and modernization.
In Amsterdam, the government adopted a shorter policy-making cycle and more agile approach to creating and testing regulations in order to provide better solutions.
In an interview with Gotham Gazette after the panel, Baron mentioned that the city constantly sees an inflow of new initiatives, such as sharing economy platforms, for instance, but related regulations are often late, outdated, or based on irrelevant data. To resolve the issue, the government began to evaluate and revise smart city regulations every three months based on the information gathered through Google analytics, social media, citizens’ feedback, and other sources. Baron referred to it as a relatively new form of measuring an output of government efforts as opposed to the more traditional three- or four-year cycle that typically accompanies a government administration.
Meanwhile, Chicago’s flagship smart cities initiative is the “Array of Things,” a network, consisting of 500 sensor clusters, with around 20 sensors in each, that will cover the entire city by 2018. About 50 sensor nodes were installed in 2016. They gather massive amounts of data on environment, infrastructure, and activity every second of every day, said Brenna Berman, former CTO of the city and current executive director of City Digital, and will continue doing so for the next five years and beyond.
Merritt referred to the Array of Things as “one of the most publicized IoT deployments, perhaps, in the world.” It was launched in 2016 and is primarily intended as a research platform. Its two purposes, Berman said, are to prove that it’s possible to build hardware that survives diverse environmental conditions for five or more years and to collect real-time data, such as air quality or noise. The data then can be used, for example, to study connection between environment and diseases, or collect traffic information and time the traffic lights. No privacy concerns were discussed at the panel.
One use-case example for the platform is mapping the safest routes for students in the neighborhoods with high rates of asthma. Analysts discovered that even changing the door through which the students enter the school or altering the path they take to get there, can decrease the rate of absences, Berman said.
According to Berman, similar projects are currently in deployment in other cities around the world, including Denver, Seattle, Delhi, and cities in the Middle East and Africa.
“What we are trying to create is an IoT-specific urban scale research platform,” Berman said. She mentioned that the “city-sensing platform” will be at scale in 2018, but data will become available to public at the end of May, this year.
In the meantime, Chicago high school students are learning about the project by recreating a small scale version of the Array of Things in their science classes. As part of “complementary” high school science curriculum, they install the sensors around the schools, gather similar data, and analyze it in class.
In a later panel on collaboration between CIO’s of the cities, Berman spoke about her approach to privacy policy for the projects like the Array of Things. To put together policy in Chicago, she first looked at Seattle and New York to learn from the work that was done and processes these cities went through. “Sensors in general are collecting data in a public way, so privacy is a component of sensors in every city. So every city is dealing with privacy. And the privacy policy for every city is going to be different,” Berman said, explaining it with differences in priorities and local communities. [pictured below, l-r: Rob Meikle, Samir Saini, Brenna Berman, Ger Baron, Jeff Merritt]
Atlanta is testing the waters by creating a “smart corridor,” before turning the whole city into a connected network.
According to Chief Information Officer Samir Saini, the future corridor, roughly a five-mile stretch of Atlanta’s North Avenue, will be packed with a blend of IoT devices from various providers, some underground, others above ground, collecting different types of data. The city then plans to analyze it and apply to improve the corridor.
“We have about 100-plus IoT sensors that will be able to see, hear, and smell every square meter of North Avenue,” Saini said at the Smart Cities panel. The sensors will gather data related to the environment, safety, and mobility.
Saini also referred to predictive analytics as a game-changer and mentioned that the city is taking baby steps in this direction, hoping for big leaps in the future. The goal is to develop a data repository “that would serve as a backbone for an urban operating system,” he said.
In Toronto, one of the largest projects that would eventually serve as a base for the smart city initiative is revitalization of the waterfront. This includes covering 2,000 acres of the waterfront area with fiber optic network that will ensure connectivity throughout the district and encouraging developers to construct smart buildings.
In addition, Toronto recently started using drones to inspect 1,800 overflows and watercourses that don’t have easy access by foot, said Rob Meikle, Chief Information Officer of the city.
All speakers agreed on the critical role of public private partnerships (P3) to advance the development of smart cities, for instance, government partnering with startups, telecommunications providers, and universities. Public space in the digital world is different from public space in the real world, said Ger Baron, and it’s important to establish relationships with technology companies, startups, telecommunications companies and others who own the digital space and the data.
For Atlanta, for instance, this type of partnership is a critical collaboration with Georgia Institute of Technology, widely known as Georgia Tech. The power of being a smart city lies in the data, Saini said, and one of the key resources for the IoT projects is data scientists, whose job it is to make sense of information and find patterns. The Atlanta-Georgia Tech partnership includes access to the university’s data scientists, whom the city government cannot attract as of now.
“It not just about a pilot or technology, but it’s really, when we talk about data, it’s about attitudes, mindsets and behaviors, and how do we foster that culture,” said Rob Meikle, speaking about establishing the civic innovation office in Toronto. Meikle’s statement refers to the importance of support of data analysis and technology projects by stakeholders within the government for the successful innovation within the cities.
Preceding the panel, Miguel Gamiño, Chief Technology Officer of New York City, shared his vision on city’s engagement in the “digital revolution” in a 20-minute keynote address. Gamiño highlighted data, connectivity and people as three key resources for smart city. He also mentioned artificial intelligence, autonomous vehicles and drones as concepts to watch and shared an overview of LinkNYC, the new wifi and multimedia kiosks that are replacing old payphones across the city, and connectivity as flagship smart city initiatives happening in New York.
“We are focused generally still on delivering broadband to all New Yorkers, so that is a consistent priority,” Gamiño told Gotham Gazette in an interview later that week. The administration is evaluating the means to integrate smart connected projects with each other, he said. “At the end of the day, that’s the real benefit to the public, is when these individual projects work with one another in a way that makes the public experience significantly better.”
Gamiño of New York City, Berman of Chicago, and Saini of Atlanta are also the founding members of Global Cities CIOs Council, created in Autumn 2016 to promote knowledge sharing and collaboration among chief technologists in the cities around the world. The council’s activities include sharing of lessons learned, potential collective negotiation with vendors, and other tasks.
“I do think in a year -- 18 months -- you will see a common deployment across two or more cities,” said Berman. “I think you will actually start to see the first cross city deployment of an IoT solution in the next year.”
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by Natalia Erokhina for Gotham Gazette
@GothamGazette
Mayor de Blasio (photo: Joanna Graham/Mayor's Office)
Mayor Bill de Blasio turned 56 on Monday, and he’s marking his birthday as politicians often do: as an opportunity to reach out to voters and fundraise for his reelection campaign ahead of a key campaign finance filing deadline. And though the mayor said he was celebrating quietly with his wife on Monday night, the festivities will stretch into Tuesday evening, with a star-studded birthday bash in Greenwich Village where dozens of donors and close allies will show their support, and loosen their purse strings, for his reelection effort.
About 50 people - five co-chairs and dozens of host committee members - are listed on an invitation to a birthday fundraiser event for the mayor being held Tuesday at Le Poisson Rouge, a club in Manhattan. Most of the hosts and co-chairs have been longtime supporters of de Blasio and have contributed to his campaigns over the years, some as far back as de Blasio’s initial City Council runs.
The five co-chairs for Tuesday’s event include Doug Dunham, a trial attorney who was also named to the host committee for the city’s unsuccessful bid to host the 2016 Democratic National Convention. Dunham contributed $1,000 to the mayor’s 2013 campaign.
Jay Jacobs, chair of the Nassau County Democratic Committee, is another co-chair of the event. “I’ve been a friend and he’s been a friend of mine for many years,” Jacobs said in a phone interview. “I was with him the first time.”
Jacobs praised the mayor’s first-term performance and said he enjoys the idea of supporting him. He brushed aside any concerns about the investigations into the mayor’s fundraising efforts, which recently concluded with no charges filed against the mayor or his associates. The mayor was never accused of any wrongdoing. “Just knowing him and the type of person he is, I wasn’t concerned,” Jacobs said. “Now that issue is behind him and he comes out looking good.” Jacobs first donated to de Blasio in 2000 when he ran for City Council and then followed up in 2013 during the mayoral campaign, giving him a combined $12,175 over the years.
Event co-chair Jimmy Nederlander has donated $9,900 to de Blasio, giving him the maximum donation of $4,950 for both his 2013 and 2017 campaigns. Nederlander is president of the Nederlander Organization, one of the country’s largest theater operators. The two other co-chairs are married couple Richard Plepler, chairman and CEO of HBO, Inc., and his wife Lisa, who chairs ArtsConnection. Richard Plepler has donated $2,750 in total to de Blasio’s past campaigns.
Although not all the co-chairs have had a history of giving substantial amounts to de Blasio, the invitation to the birthday soiree indicates that a person must raise at least $25,000 to be named a chair of the event, and $10,000 to be considered one of the hosts. These contributions would have to be bundled from multiple donors since an individual can only donate a maximum of $4,950 to a mayoral candidate. VIPs at the event are expected to raise or donate $1,000 or more, and general admission tickets are priced at $100.
Tuesday’s event will likely bring in a substantial haul for de Blasio, just before the May 15 deadline for candidates to file their latest fundraising numbers with the city’s Campaign Finance Board.
De Blasio has raised about $3.7 million so far and spent $1.4 million, leaving him with nearly $2.8 million in cash on hand. In light of the investigations into the mayor’s fundraising, particularly with increased attention to large donations to de Blasio’s now-defunct nonprofit, the Campaign for One New York, from people who do business with the city and from real estate and other special interests, de Blasio has made a conscious effort so far to focus on small dollar donations, stressing their importance in fundraising emails to supporters. As a participant in the CFB’s public matching funds program, which matches qualifying small contributions up to $175 at a 6-to-1 ratio, de Blasio stands to receive millions more for his campaign through those smaller donations.
The birthday event, however, seems to emphasize larger contributions, relying on star power to bring in big money. Celebrity hosts for the fundraising event include actors Cynthia Nixon and Alan Cumming, famed author and feminist icon Gloria Steinem, Broadway producer Tom Kirdahy and playwright Terrence McNally. In the past, de Blasio has held similar fundraisers, hosted by actors such as Steve Buscemi and Mark Ruffalo, just a few of the many liberal celebrities with whom de Blasio has strong associations.
A number of current and former elected officials are also hosting the event, including former Mayor David Dinkins, for whom de Blasio worked, Assembly Member Luis Sepulveda, and City Council Members Corey Johnson, Julissa Ferreras-Copeland, Ydanis Rodriguez, Donovan Richards, Jimmy Van Bramer, Robert Cornegy, and Mark Levine. Notably, most if not all of the Council members are jockeying to be the City Council’s next speaker (current Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito, a major de Blasio ally is term-limited out of office at the end of the year).
Johnson, who has been steadily working to position himself to become the next Council speaker, just endorsed the mayor last week and also hosted a fundraiser for him in January. “I’m proud to support his reelection,” Johnson said in a message when Gotham Gazette asked for comment about Tuesday’s fundraiser. A number of these Council members, and others who are part of the body’s Progressive Caucus, endorsed de Blasio back in December when the mayor’s campaign was actively courting support from local legislators to discourage potential opponents from jumping into the race. It was a strategy that, in combination with the results of the investigations into the mayor and his allies, worked well -- de Blasio is facing a small field of long-shot challengers in the Democratic primary.
Dr. Una Clarke, a former City Council member, mother of New York Congressional Rep. Yvette Clarke, and Brooklyn political powerhouse, has known de Blasio since her days in the City Council in the 1990s and has given about $850 in total to de Blasio for three separate campaigns. “I believe in his philosophy,” Clarke said on Monday. “He cares about the least among us.” She said she would work hard to help re-elect the mayor, and would signal to the Caribbean-American community in the city to vote for him. Like other hosts, she also said she trusted him when the cloud of the dual investigations hung over him. “I was not terribly concerned because I knew he was following the law,” she said. Insisting that investigations and accusations of impropriety are par for the course in political life, she said, “Politics is as politics is.”
For other hosts as well, de Blasio has been a welcome change from past mayors and they are eager to see him get a second term. Attorney Sal Strazzullo insists that he is neither a Democrat nor a Republican, but simply a supporter of de Blasio’s work. “I think the mayor has done some very good things for the city,” he said. “And he’s opened up a lot of eyes to causes that were swept under the rug under prior administrations.”
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by Samar Khurshid, senior reporter, Gotham Gazette
@samarkhurshid @GothamGazette