Thompson wins state Senate primary;
GI goes for Marc Coppola

by Donna M. Webb
Grand Island Dispatch, September 15, 2006

Although Grand Islanders chose Marc Coppola, the incumbent lost to Antoine Thompson on Tuesday in the Democratic contest for the 60th state Senate seat. The upset victory came in one of the day’s most hotly contested primary races.

The election was the first in which the county Board of Elections ran the local contests, and the day was not without its share of glitches. “I was trying to put out ‘little fires’ all day,” said Grand Island Town Clerk Patricia Frentzel.

In a slow, but steady turnout, Coppola received 514 votes on Grand Island, while his cousin, Alfred Coppola, received 230. Thompson was the choice of a mere 160 Grand Islanders. Overall, in a district that covers part of Buffalo and all of Grand Island and Niagara Falls, Thompson chalked up 13,791 votes to Marc Coppola’s 9,188 and Al Coppola’s 2,623. There are no Republican candidates for the seat on the November ballot.

“It felt pretty good to win the race,” Thompson said. “I spent the last seven months campaigning all day, every day … I am looking forward to working hard in Albany, being Western New York’s advocate.”

He said his top priorities will be jobs, health care, business development initiatives and allocating more resources to area schools. “Forty percent of the kids in New York State do not graduate from high school. I feel this is unacceptable.”

The other big races were those for governor, attorney general, and U.S. senator, and in these, Grand Island voters mirrored the choices of the majority. As expected, current state Attorney General Eliot Spitzer was the run-away favorite in the Democratic race for governor. He received 81 percent of the vote, while his opponent, Thomas Suozzi, garnered 19 percent.

In the Democratic battle for U.S. senator, incumbent Hillary Rodham Clinton was the easy winner over Jonathan Tasini, receiving 83 percent of the vote. In November, Clinton will square off against Republican John Spencer, former mayor of Yonkers. In the GOP primary, Spencer trounced Kathleen Troia McFarland by a margin of about 3 to 2. She is a former Pentagon official from the Reagan administration.

In the Democratic race for state Attorney General, Andrew Cuomo, son of former governor Mario Cuomo, received 53 percent of the vote. His opponents, Mark Green and Sean Patrick Maloney, picked up 33 percent and 9 percent, respectively.

Grand Island elections inspector Eileen Minton felt that the total turnout of 206 voters in Districts 12, 13, and 14 was a good one for a primary. “We have had some where you worked all day and had 50 people.” She has been working as an inspector on and off since about 1962. At Town Hall, where Minton and four other inspectors were on duty, the ratio of Democratic to Republican voters was more than 2 to 1. The Island’s 15 districts were consolidated into eight for Primary Day, a practice typical for what is usually a lighter turnout than in November.

Frentzel expressed frustration over a laundry list of difficulties that surfaced during this, the first local election run by the Erie County Board of Elections:

•Under the previous locally administered elections, the clerk’s office had a set of canvas sheets so ballots could be tabulated right on the Island. The new procedure left Frentzel’s office without the ability to give callers a hometown tally. “We didn’t know that we weren’t going to be doing that any more,” Frentzel said.

•There were not enough Democratic elections inspectors to go around. “There were shortages at five of the eight locations,” Frentzel said, adding, “There were never any open spots or shortages” when her office oversaw the elections.

•“There were a couple seals missing for the machines,” Frentzel said. These are metal bands that serve to lock up each voting machine at night. Frentzel explained that at 10:40 p.m., one of the election inspectors on Grand Island was still waiting for someone from the County Board of Elections to come to the high school to seal a machine. The second seal was missing for a machine at the fire hall.

Frentzel said she and the other town and village clerks through the county offered to put together a task force to help county election commissioners train their employees to handle the duties the clerks’ offices previously performed. “The commissioners told us that they didn’t need our help,” Frentzel said.

Several people at Town Hall said they weren’t going to bother to vote, since there was only one Republican primary race (Spencer vs. McFarland for U.S. Senate). But John Hoyt Jr. and his wife, Lisa, said it’s important to come to the polls. “If you don’t vote, you don’t have a right to complain,” John said. His wife agreed. “It’s your right to vote – you should exercise your right.”