Write-in candidate Ron Belmont wins Harrison supervisor's race, pending legal challenge

Former Harrison Supervisor Ron Belmont is the winner of the Harrison supervisor's race, following a longshot bid to recapture his old office via write-in campaign.

The win came after an all-day court hearing Wednesday at the Westchester County Supreme Court where Justice Lewis Lubell pored over 253 votes to determine whether various entries in the write-in box would be counted for Belmont.

However, Belmont may yet be prevented from taking office as an additional challenge to his eligibility remains undecided.

For weeks, the election had been delayed by legal entanglements as much of the Harrison supervisor's race had to be recounted, by hand, at the Westchester County Board of Elections. The board was prohibited from certifying its results until Lubell had been allowed to manually inspect and rule on the ballots himself.

Though Belmont was down by 43 votes against incumbent Supervisor Richard Dionisio heading into Wednesday's hearing, Belmont ultimately secured 2,119 votes by the end of the hearing, against Dionisio's 1,987.

Throughout the hearing, Dionisio's attorney, noted elections lawyer John Ciampoli, had tried to disqualify ballots featuring misspellings of Belmont's name or other technical defects. However, Lubell rebuffed much of these efforts and was relatively generous in reading misspelled ballots to be validly cast for Belmont.

"I’m not going to disenfranchise a voter because of some deficiency or inaccuracy," Lubell said.

Representatives from the Board of Elections wheeled in blue suitcases containing the contested ballots in individual bags. Crowded around a table in the well of the courtroom, attorneys for Belmont and Dionisio scrutinized every mark, dot and scribble to argue whether the vote should be tossed out.

Lubell acknowledged the "uncharted waters" he found himself in, with little legal authority to rely on, as he made his rulings, causing him to repeatedly reverse his own determinations during the hearing. Confusion and disagreement about the legal principles for every single issue that could crop up on a write-in ballot permeated the review.

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At one point, several ballots had been declared for Belmont even though his name was written in on a different column. Only minutes later, those ballots were deemed inadmissible. Later, the judge would inadvertently award a ballot to Belmont despite the wrong-column issue, forgetting he had already reversed his own opinion on that question.

"I think this is a case of first impression," Lubell remarked. "We’ve done our research, and we may be making new law."

Wednesday's hearing resolves only the immediate outcome of the race. Dionisio is still attempting to prevent Belmont from taking office because of a term-limits law that was enacted by the town last year. The law prevents a supervisor from holding office for more than five terms, which is exactly how many terms Belmont served as supervisor from 2012 to 2021.

However, the Court of Appeals invalidated a similar term-limits measure in the town of Clarkstown earlier this year, because that law had not been approved by voters in a referendum. On the same ballot on which Belmont ran his write-in campaign, the town did run a successful bid to ratify the term limits via popular vote.

But it is unclear whether the winner of a race can be dethroned by a measure which passed in the same election, on the same ballot.

Lubell indicated that he may not rule on this critical issue before the end of the year, potentially leaving the supervisor's seat vacant beginning on Jan. 1. It remains to be seen whether anyone could exercise the duties of the supervisor's office under a vacant seat.

At the last minute, Harrison Village Attorney Jonathan Kraut pleaded with the judge to move up his decision timeline, to avoid the chaos and confusion of a supervisor's vacancy. Lubell would not commit to expediting his decision.

Asher Stockler is a reporter for The Journal News and the USA Today Network New York. You can send him an email at astockler@lohud.com. Reach him securely: asher.stockler@protonmail.com.

This article originally appeared on Rockland/Westchester Journal News: Harrison supervisor race: Ron Belmont ekes out win over Richard Dionisio