It was Sandy Nurse’s second time petitioning amid an ongoing pandemic and her third time total in her efforts to get on the ballot to represent the city’s 37th district, which swaddles parts of Bushwick, Cypress Hills and East New York. Nurse first petitioned to get on the ballot in last year’s special election, had made the ballot and then, following an unsuccessful petition challenge from a Democratic Party leader named Darma Diaz, the election was canceled by the governor last April. The next election was the primary last June, for which petitioning efforts were shut down in the middle of March due to the pandemic’s spread and the lack of information about its transmission. Nurse recalls with surprise petitioning maskless as the city was thrown into confusion and beginning to close its doors. Another candidate on the ballot, an East New York businessman named Misba Abdin, had stopped his petitioning efforts after catching the virus himself.

“She’s going to try to kick everyone off the ballot again, that’s what they do,” Nurse told Bushwick Daily.

The signatures Nurse and her fellow candidates had gathered last March weren’t enough to withstand the scrutiny of the Board of Elections. At Diaz’s behest, the BOE threw everyone off the ballot except for Diaz herself, enabling her to win the primary uncontested, a process that its detractors label a transparently undemocratic function of Democratic Party politics in New York. “She’s been a party to kicking people off ballots 14 times in a row,” Nurse added while leading her own petition-gathering effort this year.