Could Anthony Constantino’s petitioning strategy hinder his NY-21 run?

Anthony Constantino at the kick-off event for his congressional campaign in November of 2025. Photo from ‘Constantino for Congress’ Facebook page.

Mar 30, 2026 —

In mid-March, Politico reported that Constantino’s campaign had hired a petition carrier who had previously been convicted of forging petition signatures. Constantino fired that man shortly after. 

Last week, the Malone Telegram and the Watertown Daily Times reported that Constantino’s campaign has been collecting signatures in ways that could potentially render them invalid, and even keep Constantino off the ballot altogether.

In response to those stories, Constantino has directly contacted reporters, including Alex Gault, the Capitol Bureau chief for the Watertown Daily Times. Gault says Constantino berated him and demanded he quit his job.

Amy Feieresiel spoke with Gault about his reporting, starting with what ballot access signatures are and why candidates need them. Their conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

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ALEX GAULT: For Congress, if you want to run as a Republican like Anthony Constantino is, you have to go and you have to get signatures from 1,250 registered Republican voters who live in the district. New York has one of the more difficult processes to actually make it to the ballot, and campaigns spend a significant amount of time -not so much money oftentimes because they’re working with volunteers- but there’s a lot of effort put into this process.

The common way is to knock on doors. You have a list of people that you know live in the district, are registered to vote in the district, and are members of the party that you want to appear under. You turn those in, and then the Board of Elections reviews them, and if everything looks good, then you are given a spot on the ballot.

AMY FEIEREISEL: OK, can you tell me a little bit about how Anthony Constantino’s campaign has been going about getting those signatures, and why it’s a little unusual and potentially even invalidating [for some signatures]?

GAULT: He [Constantino] told Politico that he has a Petitions Manager, essentially, somebody who is running the operation for him. He doesn’t have volunteers. He’s paying people as much as $30 an hour, which is not abnormal,  people do pay petition carriers to go around. [However] it doesn’t appear that he’s given specific directions to them to knock on doors. Many of them are, but there are also people who are posting online about how they are sitting outside of an Ollie’s discount store or in a Hannaford’s parking lot. One of my colleagues, the editor of the Malone-Telegram, Rich Rosentrader, he was actually approached by two individuals for the Constantino campaign. They walked up to him, said he looked like a Republican. He is not registered to a party, was not eligible to sign that petition, and just walked away. As he walked away, he saw that they had asked someone else behind him to sign the petition.

FEIEREISEL: And so why does that raise questions?

GAULT: Firstly, the people who are carrying the petitions have to be either a notary public or they have to be a member of the Republican Party. It’s not clear that everybody who is working for the Constantino campaign is either one of those things. What’s more significant is that compared to when you’re going door to door, you don’t know who you’re approaching or who is approaching you in a public place. You have no indication of what their name is, what their party registration is, where they live. And when I talk to people who do carry petitions or a Democratic Elections Commissioner for Onondaga County, what I was told was that campaigns are advised not to conduct their petitioning in that way because it can pose problems down the line, once you’ve submitted these petitions, in the objections process.

FEIEREISEL: What are those problems down the road once he turns in the signatures?

GAULT: The Board of Elections does essentially a cursory review. Then individuals who live within NY-21 can file objections. They’re questioning the validity of whether the person isn’t registered to vote, is [or is] not a Republican, is not actually a resident of the district, does not live at the address that they wrote on the petition. And then there are also other objections that can rise to the level of allegations of fraud, like that somebody signed for someone else. Which those can actually be taken to court as well.

FEIEREISEL: Do you think it’s likely that someone will file objections?

GAULT: I do. It’s very common to see objections for any candidate. You see them in town, village, county level elections. It is common and it’s considered standard practice in congressional politics to object to your opponent’s petitions.

FEIEREISEL: Big picture, this could potentially mean that Constantino was not able to have his name on the ballot, correct? If enough names were objected to and it turned out that they weren’t done correctly.

GAULT: Right. You have to get 1,250 valid signatures. Most campaigns shoot for far above that. But if there are significant enough issues, if say, all of the petitions that a specific circulator turned in are deemed invalid, that can be thousands of names.

FEIEREISEL: What I’d like to do now is turn from your reporting to how Constantino’s campaign and Anthony Constantino himself have reacted. So tell me a little bit more about that response.

GAULT: Yeah, so when I first started reporting on this story. I reached out through his campaign press aide who said that they would forward the [story] questions over to Anthony and to his campaign manager, and they would get back to me. They did not get back to me. They never returned any further requests for comment. Instead, Anthony took to Facebook…and he called for me to be fired, and then he started texting me. And in our text exchange, he criticized the articles that I write, and he demanded that I quit my job. And then he threatened to, quote, “accelerate the process if I do not” leave my job willingly. And I’ve never, in my six years of reporting on congressional politics, ever had that kind of interaction with an elected official or a candidate for office.

FEIEREISEL: Wow. Designating petitions can be circulated until Thursday, April 2nd, and then they have to turn them in soon after that. Then what happens?

GAULT: Once the petitions are turned in, we’ll get a sense of how many names are included and whether objections are likely to make a dent in that. From there, there will [likely] be an objection. That process will take a couple of weeks to play out, and we’ll get a preliminary ruling definitely before June, which is when the primary will be at the end of June.

I expect that this will be a drawn out fight. I expect that there will probably be a legal challenge to whatever ruling is put down. So yeah, it’s now just a bit of a waiting game to see what ends up being turned in.