A class action lawsuit was filed yesterday in a New York federal district court by a group of Hasidic Jews against the Sullivan County Board of Elections that oversees voting in the small Village of Bloomingburg, New York. According to
Newsweek, in January the Board of Elections sent notices to 184 of the Village's 285 registered voters to show cause why the Board should not cancel their voter registrations. More than 160 of the voters receiving the notices are Hasidim. Last month the Board announced that it would move ahead to cancel registrations of 156 of these voters-- comprising virtually every Hasidic Jewish resident of the Village. The suit alleges that the voters were singled out only because of their religion. A lawsuit filed last year charges the Village more generally with acting together with a neighboring town to keep more Hasidic Jews from moving into the area. (See
prior posting.)
Failed Messiah blog says that the Village has good cause to cancel the voter registrations:
The suit is backed by Shalom Lamm, the Modern Orthodox developer [of a Bloomingburg housing project] who ... deceived (and, some say, bribed) his way past naive locals to get the original go-aheads for the project, which was always meant to be a 396-unit high density Satmar hasidic village but camouflaged as a low density 125-home golf course vacation and retirement community....
The hasidim who were disqualified from voting almost all claimed one of Lamm's private homes in the village as their residence, with more than a dozen adults showing the same single family home as their "official" residence. The property, however, showed no sign of regular habitation....
