A little after 10:30 p.m., the results were in: 1,064 votes for incumbent Mayor Elena Villafane with 62 write-in votes for Mr. Ehrlich. - nytimes.com
The Tuesday election in the Long Island Village of Sea Cliff capped eight turbulent days and seemingly ended a quixotic write-in campaign by a brash snack-food mogul Robert Ehrlich.
Robert Ehrlich, the founder of Pirate’s Booty Snacks, acquired by B&G Foods for $195 million in 2013, marched into the Village Hall in Sea Cliff (pop. 5,000) and announced that he was now the mayor. Everyone else, he said, was fired.
Mr. Ehrlich, 66, said he was invoking a 2009 state law that empowers residents to dissolve their town or reformulate it. The first step is to gather signatures from 10 percent of the town’s voters. Mr. Ehrlich waved an envelope that he claimed held 1,800 signatures. He declined to show them to anyone because he said the signers were afraid of retribution.
Mr. Ehrlich said he wanted to meet with the governor to enforce his claim. As for the current administration, he said he will sue them for $390 million for impeding his business opportunities. Speaking with an authority that only he recognized, he said, “I plan on taking their homes.”
“I told him to leave and called the police,” said Bruce Kennedy, the village administrator. Sea Cliff does not tolerate the current national embrace of overt mental illness.
Elena Villafane, the incumbent mayor, who was running uncontested until Mr. Ehrlich’s surprise announcement, won the last election with only 182 votes, but Robert Erlich's efforts led to a far higher than normal voter turnout. The job pays $12,000 a year and is, she said, a lot of work.
Elena Villafane pointed out what she saw as a flaw in Mr. Ehrlich’s electoral logic. “He wants to dissolve the village,” she said. “OK. There’s a process for that. Go ahead. But then if you dissolve the village, there’s no village to be a mayor of.”
Ehrlich has a history of legal battles with the village. After a 2004 lawsuit over a zoning dispute, in which he accused town officials of discriminating against him because he was Jewish, he was ordered to pay $900,000 to cover the officials’ legal fees.
On Tuesday, Election Day, Mr. Ehrlich and his supporters circulated what he called “a second ballot,” in a nearby park which — unlike those at the polling center — included his name along with Ms. Villafane’s. By midday he claimed to have collected nearly 800 votes at his "alternate voting site". Surely this meant he was the true mayor, he said.
“This is not going to be a peaceful transfer of power,” Ehrlich vowed. “If wealthy people give in to the tyranny of American democracy we have no future.”
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