Yorktown GOP, Dems Disagree Over Campaign Email

Yorktown town Councilman Vishnu Patel, who is running against incumbent Michael Grace for the town supervisor position, sent out an email blast to residents Monday on a campaign issue.

SEE: Letter to the Editor: No on Yorktown Highway Garage

Thursday, the Republicans held a press conference in front of Town Hall to denounce the mailing.

“I can’t think of anything more obnoxious than receiving campaign solicitations on an email address provided to my town for the purposes of receiving official town communications,” Grace said, according to the Yorktown Daily Voice.

Democrats dismissed the Republican charge that they had improperly used the town’s email lists.

Ron Stokes, co-chairman of the Yorktown Democratic Committee, called it an irresponsible and self-serving attempt to divert attention from the subject of Patel’s email, which covered his opposition to the town’s controversial highway garage project.

Grace said he received numerous complaints over the phone and in person about the email, the Daily Voice reported.

Patel’s email was sent to about 9,000 recipients. Roughly 6,000 addresses were purchased from a commercial vendor and 2,700 were obtained from the Town of Yorktown through the FOIL process.

Stokes said anyone who received the email had the option to ask to have their email address removed from the list. He said that to date, less than one tenth of one percent of the recipients who received Patel’s email asked to be removed from the list and their addresses were immediately deleted.

Councilwoman Susan Siegel said campaigning by email is now common. In the town of North Castle, for example, both Republicans and Democrats have used emails to campaign for at least the past five years. Both parties use lists that have been obtained by foiling town email lists and supplementing those lists with commercially purchased lists. As a result, the cost of campaigning for local office in North Castle is significantly lower than the cost in other towns. This means less need to rely on campaign contributors seeking favors from the town, she said.