Mulgrew's Unity UFT caucus uses its outsized power to change our trusted union election vendor, AAA, for a Wall Street holding company with a 'checkered and unscrupulous' past?
After losing the retiree and para chapter elections, Mulgrew's Unity caucus uses its outsized power in leadership to change vendors for our UFT elections. That's strange, right? So is the new vendor.
When non-Unity members of the UFT Election Committee met at UFT headquarters, 52 Broadway, this past Tuesday, they heard a rather strange new development about a change to the way we will vote in our upcoming 2025 UFT citywide elections.
The chair of the committee, Mulgrew/Unity caucus loyalist, Carl Cambria, announced that the UFT had decided to change out the longstanding, reputable vendor who monitors and administers our union’s mail-in balloting, The American Arbitration Association (AAA).
This came as a surprise to many union insiders because for years non-profit arbitration stalwart and giant, AAA, has monitored and conducted our elections — as they have for most of the major NYC unions.
Keep in mind that AAA has a “long history and experience in the field of alternative dispute resolution, providing services to individuals and organizations who wish to resolve conflicts out of court.” In addition to decades of experience in running and monitoring union elections, we use their trusted arbitrators for our many other grievance and legal disputes.
Cambria told the election committee that a 9 year old Wall Street holding company, General Election Services Inc. would now be in charge of the mail-in balloting process for the UFT’s nearly 200k members.
The rationale shared was that leadership was upset with AAA for allegedly messing up the para chapter election when a Unity caucus retiree flyer was sent out with the mail-in ballots, instead of their Unity para flyer. Fix Para Pay, the opponent caucus’ flyer was mailed out with the ballots and we all know that FPP trounced Unity garnering 75% of the vote.
Despite their explanation that alleges no voting irregularities, it’s still unclear if the flyer snafu was AAA’s or a mistake by the Unity caucus leader and UFT secretary, LeRoy Barr.
They must not understand that their flyers had nothing to do with their loss. Their continued inability to deliver a living wage for paras was the reason.
Who is General Election Services and their chairman, John S. Matthews?
General Election Services, Inc. has limited experience running mostly paper ballot elections for organizations in comparison to AAA. GES is owned by Global Arena Holding, Inc. It claims, rather inauspiciously, that it has 40 years of “combined experience” conducting elections. But, the truth is, it’s only been around since 2015.
Matthews has a disturbing checkered past of alleged business wrongdoing and financial misconduct.
GES’ and Global Arena’s advisory board of shareholders includes, Barcadi owner, Facundo Bacardi and former NBA player, Kiki VanDeWeghe.
Concerning business misconduct and debts in default
Matthews, the GES and Global Arena chairman, has been fined and suspended in the past for his wrongful business dealings.
“John S. Matthews of New York, New York, the former owner of Global Arena Capital Corporation, was fined $25,000 and suspended for six months from association with any Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) member after consenting to findings that he engaged in unauthorized private securities transactions.”
In fact, the GES parent firm has now been expelled from FINRA, altogether. The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority is a non-profit organization that regulates the securities industry in the United States.
And then there is the 2022 SEC filing for the parent company, Global Arena, and its related holdings that should sound an alarm about the viability of his entire for-profit corporate enterprise:
“The accompanying consolidated financial statements have been prepared in conformity with accounting principles generally accepted in the United States of America, which contemplates the continuation of the Company as a going concern.
The Company has generated recurring losses from operations and cash flow deficits from its operations since inception and has had to continually borrow to continue operating. In addition, certain of the Company’s debt is in default as of December 31, 2022. These factors raise substantial doubt about the Company’s ability to continue as a going concern.
The continued operations of the Company are dependent upon its ability to raise additional capital, obtain additional financing and/or acquire or develop a business that generates sufficient positive cash flows from operations. The Company continues to raise funds from the issuance of additional convertible promissory note. Management is hopeful that with their ability to raise additional funds that the Company should be able to continue as a going concern.”
How Reliable is GES?
GES’ claim to fame from its austere website is its handling the logistics for the 2020 North Dakota democratic primary election in which only 14k North Dakotans voted.
Yet, it’s also unclear if GES has ever handled a union election for over 200k members with hundreds of candidates, like our UFT elections.
GES botched a Teamsters election in 2016, in Chicago, Illinois. Although the internal election supervisor refused to rerun or overturn the election, the conclusion of this report is a scathing rebuke of GES’ professional failures. They also lost the union local’s contract moving forward.
Another union election was steeped in controversy because of GES. SEIU Local 1021 with more than 50,000 members in Northern California had its union election in February and March 2016. Members charged that very few members knew about the elections and only 3500 voted and most of the votes came from one California county only. The comments in the linked article also allege that GES has a history of not paying its independent contractors.
More recently, last year, GES was used by DC 37’s Local 372 to administer a controversial rerun election. After a tight election result with extremely low turnout, there was a complaint filed that alleges that GES was not legally hired, along other alleged irregularities.
The complaint about the legality of hiring of GES was dismissed because the arbitrator said that the RFP bids were brought to the local’s election committee and executive board, prior to its selection.
In contrast, this has not happened with the UFT’s decision to change the vendor, at all. The UFT Election committee did not have an opportunity to review the RFPs but were told by the Election Committee Chair, Carl Cambria, that the decision has already been made from on top.
Expect the Unity-controlled UFT Executive Board to rubber stamp this decision to change vendors at its next meeting. Surely, an election complaint may need to be filed as a result.
What about our privacy?
Another BIG, BIG concern is that our data will now be shared with this unsavory for-profit Wall Street holding company. How will UFT leadership ensure our data is protected from the ravenous, oft-unchecked whims of Big Wall Street?
Is their privacy disclaimer available to us now?
Who Should We Trust?
Finally, who should UFT members trust more to handle a fair and honest election…?
1. AAA — The not-for-profit American Arbitration Association -International Centre for Dispute Resolution who is the largest private global provider of alternative dispute resolution (ADR) services in the world. AAA, with its trusted, reputable certified arbitrators and legal experts, and decades of election experience.
or
2. A fly-by-night Wall Street holding company that is in default for debts and has lost its FINRA credentials for business misconduct?
Both entities do not hire unionized workers. Yet, Mulgrew and his administrative Unity Caucus want us to trust them to entrust the latter, GES and Global Arena.
Hmm. What do you think?
Editor’s Postscript: At the election committee meeting, Unity also spoke out against a motion to implement electronic voting for the upcoming 2025 election. They maintain this stubborn posture despite a growing petition of over 1500 UFT members asking for more options to be added to the traditional mail-in voting method as a way to deal with the UFT’s historic voter apathy problem.
They made various recycled excuses for not being able to implement changes for this upcoming election but not once admitting their new GES vendor has very little experience compared to AAA in administering a wide scale electronic voting option.
They are calling for an exploratory task force to be formed to explore the possible use of electronic voting for the 2028 election. But truth be told, they’ve been studying the problem of voter apathy and possible solutions for over a decade, as Arthur Goldstein recently revealed.
Embarrassingly, they went into the elections committee meeting arguing that the UFT Constitution says “there must be printed ballots”, when in fact it reads: “Voting shall be by written OR printed ballot”.
In most courts, the word “written” has been interpreted to include handwritten or typed text. There’s plenty of precedent for this. The disjunctive ‘OR’ in the language also separates any attempts to claim the ballot must be written on paper. The intentional ambiguity in the Constitution’s legal language in no way explicitly or implicitly requires a paper ballot. Actually, it allows for UFT leadership to pursue electronic voting, while still allowing for typed mail-in ballots. Nonetheless, expect them to waffle, hem and haw.
To be clear, there are no legal obstacles other than their cynical obstruction of member voice and bottomless appetite for voter suppression.
They are the Caucus of Voter and Member Suppression. The Caucus of “No, We Can’t”.
Despite their antics, we will still vote them out next spring with A BETTER CONTRACT.
Can this or a shorter informative piece be written up and distributed at the upcoming DA and RTC meetings so that folks can be informed?