Blakeman backer still a player after Dem faction fight

Daily Point

Open borders between Brooklyn Dems and Nassau GOP?

The high profile battle for control of the Brooklyn Democratic Committee has led up to the departure of its six-year county chairman, Assemb. Rodneyse Bichotte Hermelyn.

As a result, the Long Island law firm of Abrams Fensterman has been removed from its role representing the committee in a court battle involving that party transition. The firm's founding partner Howard Fensterman, long involved with the Brooklyn Democrats, happens to serve these days as finance chairman for Republican Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman in his MAGA campaign to unseat Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul.

As Newsday's news division reported in August, the Blakeman-allied county legislature approved $730,000 in new contracts with the firm that month. Lawyers at Abrams Fensterman, where Blakeman once worked, contributed $43,000 to Blakeman's campaign.

Frank Seddio, an ex-assemblyman who preceded Bichotte Hermelyn as Brooklyn chairman, was associated with the firm while in office. So was former New York City Mayor Eric Adams' former chief of staff Frank Carone, who's currently accused by the federal government of steering city contracts for migrant shelters worth more than $6.8 million to a hotel owner in exchange for $120,000 in kickbacks.

Meanwhile, retiring Rep. Nydia Velázquez is directing the party's executive committee. She got a court order last week to confirm the end of the Fensterman firm's involvement in that wider litigation over who runs the county committee.

Fensterman, for his part, has been cementing closer ties to Long Island Republicans. On Monday, a website of the Jewish Chabad communities publicized a visit by Nassau County Republican Committee chairman Joe Cairo visiting the Ohel Chabad-Lubavitch in Cambria Heights, Queens. Accompanying him was Fensterman.

The visit was joined by Rabbi Anchelle Perl, director of Chabad of Mineola, and Rabbi Shalom Paltiel, director of Chabad of Port Washington.

Apparently, with less than a month to Election Day, the political polarization hasn't killed personal friendships across partisan lines that could prove useful to the long-struggling GOP outside Long Island.

— Dan Janison dan.janison@newsday.com

Pencil Point

Too scarred to be scared

For more cartoons, visit www.newsday.com/nationalcartoons

Data Point

The mail-in ballot factor 

Ahead of the midterm elections, a White House executive order called for broad changes to mail-in voting, including having postal workers deliver ballots only to voters on a preapproved list and requiring election mail to have unique barcodes and an official logo.

The executive order was blocked by the Supreme Court, which ruled that state and local election officials did not have sufficient time to implement the rules.

Voting by mail has gained popularity since the COVID-19 pandemic, when New York no longer required voters to state a valid reason for obtaining an absentee ballot. While that rule is now back in force, since 2023 voters have had the right to request an early mail-in ballot which serves the same function.

But just how many Long Islanders use absentee ballots?

In the 2025 election, the last to mainly focus on local elections, around 54,415 Long Islanders voted by mailing in their ballots, according to data from the Nassau and Suffolk elections boards. A year earlier in an election where a presidential race was at the top of the ticket, 72,700 Long Islanders voted by mail. Interestingly, that was fewer than the 74,800 mail-in ballots sent in 2022, which featured the gubernatorial race between Gov. Kathy Hochul and Rep. Lee Zeldin, a Long Island native.

Out of Nassau County's 1,002,784 registered voters (about the population of Delaware), 32,568 mailed their ballots last year. That is about 11% of the more than 308,000 people who voted in county executive, legislative and other local races. But interestingly, more than half of those mail ballots, 18,119, were cast in CD4 which includes much of Hempstead Town, where the supervisor's race was on the ballot.

Due to the change to even-year voting, the Hempstead supervisor's seat is on the ballot again this fall along with a nationally watched House seat. In the district, flipped blue two years ago, Democratic incumbent Rep. Laura Gillen is being challenged by Republican Jeanine Driscoll, the Hempstead Town receiver of taxes.

How the internal dynamics of the two races will affect the outcomes is one of this election's most intriguing questions.

In Suffolk County, 21,847 voters mailed in their votes in last year's local election for county legislators, the district attorney and town supervisors. That was less than 10% of the nearly 230,000 votes, and a fraction of the 1,077,633 voters in the county. Across Long Island, registered Democrats mailed in 26,953 ballots in 2025 while registered Republicans sent in 15,428, and voters with no party affiliation sent in 10,504 ballots.

— Karthika Namboothiri karthika.namboothiri@newsday.com

Subscribe to The Point here and browse past editions of The Point here.