Sandra Cunningham

Hudson County Executive Thomas DeGise had "no comment" when asked about the presence of a convicted child molester in the Sandra Bolden Cunningham’s campaign for the Democratic State Senate nomination.

"I’m not even going to go there," said DeGise, who is running for re-election on a ticket that in the 31st district includes Cunningham, Bayonne Councilman Anthony Chiappone and former Jersey City Councilman L. Harvey Smith.

 State Senate candidate Sandra Bolden Cunningham with campaign worker Russell Wallace, a convicted sex offender

Sandra Bolden Cunningham, who is running for state Senate in the 31st district, includes represents parts of Jersey City and Bayonne, received the support last week of Senate President (and former Governor) Richard Codey.

“I gave her campaign $5,000,” said Codey.

Assemblyman Louis Manzo greets Raffaela Crittelli at Pathmark
Sandra Bolden Cunningham, widow of Mayor Glenn Cunningham, walks Jersey City --  too tall to her critics, who complain that she has a Queen Elizabeth-like presence that belies her wobbling legs when it comes to public policy.

Low to the ground, by contrast, is Assemblyman Louis Manzo, a onetime Cunningham ally who has made several unsuccessful bids for Mayor.

Critics say Manzo is combative, that he lacks the temperament for the State Senate, and is alienated politically on an island of his own making.

Add to that list of New Jersey disappearances including the arm of Chad Pennington, the glassworks of Trenton, and the Haunted Mansion of Long Branch the mysterious 2007 district 31 Senate candidacy of Sean Cotter.

Assemblyman Louis Manzo, himself a candidate for state Senate in district 31, says real estate developer Cotter told him Jersey City Mayor Jerramiah Healy offered Cotter jobs in exchange for Cotter’s help in entering the Senate race as a spoiler. Healy -- who along with the Hudson County Democratic Organization -- backs Manzo’s chief rival Sandra Bolden Cunningham, calls the charge an outright falsehood.

Last Friday, on the same day Manzo said his legal team was going to make the information public in a Newark courtroom where Manzo was challenging the legitimacy of Cunningham’s primary petition, Cotter abruptly exited the Senate race with a fax to the state Division of Elections Office.

Judge Joseph Paone of the state Office of Administratve Law today ruled in favor of keeping Sandra Bolden Cunningham on the Democratic Primary ballot.

Cunningham, a candidate for State Senate in district 31, last week received a legal challenge from rival candidate Assemblyman Louis Manzo, who said Cunningham should not be allowed to participate in the primary because she filed a general election and not a primary election petition.

In his decision Thursday afternoon, Paone granted there were problems with Cunningham's petition and acknowledged many of the signatures Cunningham submitted were defective. 

In a combative political state, it figures that it would come down to Jersey City and Bayonne and the 31st district that incorporates pieces of both those two-fisted towns, where Sandra Bolden Cunningham and Assemblyman Louis Manzo both want to be State Senator.

First the two rivals need to slog across that Normandy Beach of mayhem and doom otherwise known as a Hudson County Democratic Party Primary. But whether or not Cunningham will even be able to participate in the action now hinges on Judge Joseph Paone of the state Office of Administrative Law, who today said he needed more time to reach a decision in the case of Manzo v. Cunningham.

Assemblyman Louis Manzo apparently came to fight in the district 31 Senate race, where the latest casualty to emerge from the political House of Atreus called Hudson County is Sean Cotter of Bayonne.

Last month, Cotter was grabbing cute ledes in the Star-Ledger referring to his tennis game, and as late as last week was advancing himself as a “New Frontier Democrat� from Bayonne.

This week he’s out of the race, not returning phone calls, and being depicted by Manzo as little more than a prop in the Machiavellian stagecraft of Jersey City Mayor Jerramiah Healy and the Hudson County Democratic Organization.

The state Division of Elections office says Nicholas Chiaravallotti and Shelia Newton-Moses, candidates for the General Assembly in the 31st district, filed their petitions wrong in time for Monday’s primary deadline.

"They filed for the general election," said spokesman David Wald. "It’s unclear what the division is going to do. We have confirmed the petitions were accepted for the general election."

Chiaravalloti acknowledged that his petitions incorrectly, but noted that he submitted signatures for both the general and the primary -- and that when the Division of Elections throws out the ones he filed for the general, he still has plenty to qualify for the -- and Newton-Moses says she does too, he said.

To an outsider it may seem extraordinary that a well-oiled political machine like the Hudson County Democratic Organization could mess up the petitions of a State Senate candidate in a hotly contested primaries, but there is some historical precedence to shabby petitions from Jersey City Democrats Bobby Jackson and Joe Cardwell that may explain it.

31st district State Senate candidate Sandra Bolden Cunningham filed the wrong petitions and may not be on the June ballot, the Jersey Journal is reporting. Her running mates, Assembly candidates Anthony Chiappone and L. Harvey Smith, filed correctly.

If Cunningham's name is removed from the ballot -- her lawyers are prepared to argue that it should not be -- it would leave the battle for the Democratic nomination to Louis Manzo, a two-term Assemblyman, and Sean Cotter.