Supposed champion of “election integrity” Republican Congressman Lee Zeldin’s campaign was caught submitting photocopied petition signatures and disqualified from appearing on the November general election ballot as the nominee of the now-defunct “Independence Party” in the New York State governor’s race, City and State New York reports. The 2020 election denier from the grimy MAGA part of Suffolk County on Long Island sought to benefit from a vagary in New York election laws that allow Republican and Dem candidates to appear redundantly on ballots as the nominees for minor parties no one’s ever heard of and never run their own candidates – Often uncontested local races for municipal judgeships and other offices will even have the same candidate running as the Democrat, the Republican, the Libertarian, and four or five other parties.

So Zeldin will appear twice for governor on the ballot, as both the Republican and Conservative Party’s nominees. He and the other statewide GOP candidates could’ve had third lines as the nominees of the defunct Independence Party had the Libertarians not dug in, finding multiple pages of the petition had been duplicated, leading the State Board of Elections to determine the GOP slate fell a few thousand short of the 45,000 signature minimum for access to the line (Why the hell this state allows a living major party to hijack the name of a dead one is a story for another day).

“Republicans talk about election integrity, but the Zeldin campaign attempted to fly under the radar and submit 11,000 fraudulent signatures in an attempt to get a third line on the ballot,” New York Libertarian Party Secretary Andrew Kolstee told City and State. “Let’s not forget: Lee Zeldin was one of the many far-right Republicans who voted to overturn the 2020 presidential election under the guise of election fraud,” added New York State Dem Chairman Jay Jacobs.