THE NEW YORK CITY 2021 HISTORICAL PRIMARY ELECTION AND THE ROLE ASAAL PLAYED

Maf Misbah Uddin: New York City’s Primary Election was over on Tuesday, June 22, 2021. The result of in person voting based on first ranked-choice was announced yesterday! These unofficial results were published before applying ranked choice voting, mail and absentee ballot counting, to the candidates’ standings in their respective positions. In a few cases they are winners buy most case candidates have to wait for the final result.

Congratulations to our own Attorney Soma Syed for making us all proud! Soma, a life member of ASAAL since 2018 and from the first day we knew one day we could help her become a Judge of the City of New York.When she announced her running for Queens County Civil Court Judge we endorsed her immediately and brought the entire community from Jamaica to Jackson Heights to Astoria and all places in between and we kept campaigning. Soma’s election proved we can, our community can come together and unified to accomplish something as big as this, a history making milestone! Our National Women’s Committee Chair Sahana Begum led the phone banking with Queens Chapter Vice President Afroza Begum Rosey and our Queens chapter Women’s Committee Chair Adan Islam led the charge in distributing the palm cards area wide, where Queens Chapter and Political Director Sultana Khanom lead the campaign in Astoria and Jackson Heights and President Monirul Islam and Executive Vice President Nurul Haque were the keys to the victory. As we won, Soma won, and with this election night victory is the victory of whole Bangladeshi Community and we won in historical proportion. ASAAL started 13 years ago with a promise to our South Asian Community and to America that we will  educate, activate, and agitate our South Asian people to do mainstream politics and accordingly ever since we endorsed 100s of candidates intelligently with a vigorous screening process across the city and worked hard to elect them.

Our winning percentage is very high, some year as high as 95%, which gave us incentive to expand our chapters across America. Today we have 15 Chapters and are active in 8 States including New York, New Jersey, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Washington DC, Maryland, and Florida.This year In New York City we endorsed a total of 44 candidates for 41 seats including 11 South Asians for 8 positions. We proudly say among 8 South Asians 3 of them won (38%) in their initial election results, they are (1) Attorney Soma Sayed, Bangladesh origin – as the Queens County Civil Court Judge; Soma received 74,487 = 50.95 % as opposed to her opponent Mr. Goldman who received 70, 714 = 48.37% votes, a difference of 3,773 votes, with approximately 24,000 absentee ballots to be counted; (2) Shahana Hanif, Bangladesh origin – as the City Council Democratic candidate from the Brooklyn Council District 39, received 10,691 = 32.42% and her nearest opponent received 22.52%; and (3) Shekar Krishnan, India origin – as the City Council Democratic candidate from Queens Council District 25, he received 3,167 = 30.80% and his nearest candidate received 17.70%. Both Shahana and Shekar must wait until the ranked choice voting results are distributed! Each of them is required to receive 50%+1 votes of the total vote cast on June 22 to win. It means Shahana and Shekar must receive 16,490 votes or more than 5,799 and 5,143 or more than 1,976 votes respectively as a 2nd choice from the candidate winning 5th, 4th, and 3rd positions in their respective districts! We have advised both Shahana and a Shekar to keep their election team alert and ready to have a runoff election among the the top two vote getter should they fall below 50%+1 vote of the original vote cast on the Election Day!On the other hand we endorsed 33 non South Asian candidates. 20 of them won (61%) their seats. As we stated before we endorsed candidates based on their understanding of South Asian issues and the problems we face. We believe their winning including our own South Asian candidates can help elevate South Asians one notch higher in New York City politics. We strongly believe all three South Asian candidates will win when all the counting is over and the official result will be announced. We, all South Asians, and specifically Bangladeshis should celebrate just based on the result we came to know on election night. Just this result alone should make us proud like no other time, glad like we never were and honored to be on the table for the first time in New York City history! Our days have come, we have arrived, and we are here to stay in New York City politics.

Readers may be searching the reason why none of the other Bangladeshi candidates did not do well in the primary election? When two are leading why then the rest is sinking at the bottom! As we said before, here at ASAAL, we vigorously screened candidates for the position they are seeking. Many a time we endorsed a non South Asian for a position knowing that the South Asian can’t qualify and can’t win the race, making some folks angry!

Let’s us make this clear to our readers, today’s Soma Syed, who made us all proud, also ran for City Council with five other South Asians only few months ago in February (now June), we screened all 7 of them and found 7th guy, Mr. Jim Gennaro, will win and decided not to endorse any of them and escaped with supporting ranked-choice voting! We were right when result came all six South Asians combined, including Soma, could not garner more votes for them than Mr. Gennaro winning with 59%!

Later you saw for same Soma Syed how much we worked for her to win as she was uniquely qualified for that judgeship she was running. Therefore in the future if we, here at ASAAL, don’t endorse a South Asian candidate or a Bangladeshi candidate please remember some of these candidates embracing results and know the real reason behind it.

As per Mayoral and Comptroller election results are concerned, as I explained above, in case of Shahana and Shekar election results, they too have to wait until rank choice voting process is done and absentee ballots are counted. There too, specially in Mayoral results end of the counting there most likely will have a runoff between Eric Adam’s and Maya Wiley, and again, this still remains as anybody’s game!

In conclusion let me say that, in mainstream politics, whether you are a candidate, or an organization like us or a volunteer like our members there is no shortcut. Only through hard work can you achieve your result and victory! So Let us keep up the good work and know this is the beginning and we have a long way to go! Stay tuned, stay safe, join ASAAL and be part of the mainstream politics and be blessed.

(Maf Misbah Uddin, ASAAL National President; President Local 1407 and Treasurer DC 37.)