Finley Files NYTHA Election Appeal

by T.D. Thornton 
In response to a request for additional documentation to be used as evidence at an upcoming dispute resolution hearing, Terry Finley has filed an expanded letter of protest with the New York Thoroughbred Horsemen's Association, underscoring his demand for a new election to reconcile his claims of a deeply flawed process that led to his 14-vote defeat in the organization's Dec. 1 voting for president. 

Finley's initial Dec. 8 protest letter was a personally written three pages outlining the alleged failure of ballots to be mailed to all eligible voters and perceived conflicts of interest by election board officials. 

But the Jan. 5 missive filed on Finley's behalf by the law firm Boies, Schiller & Flexner LLP is a 12-page legal salvo that accentuates Finley's claims of malfeasance in far greater detail. 

Accompanying the protest letter are 29 separate exhibits and affidavits that purport to prove that balloting irregularities and the allegedly “biased” behavior of election board members aligned with incumbent president Rick Violette Jr. “utterly compromised the integrity of the election.” 

In between Finley's two letters of protest, NYTHA had agreed to investigate and hold a hearing on his election complaints. But Finley then argued that the NYTHA board was essentially assigning itself to investigate its own alleged wrongdoings, a process that Finley's attorneys characterized in a Dec. 22 letter as “procedurally insufficient” and “fundamentally and fatally flawed.” 

NYTHA executive director James Gallagher confirmed on Tuesday that he received Finley's second demand letter, but he declined to comment on the issue. 

“It's clear. A new NYTHA election is necessary,” Finley wrote in an email to TDN. “One that is fair, transparent and independent. One in which every single eligible NYTHA member is afforded the opportunity to cast a vote. I ask the members of the NYTHA board to do the right thing and immediately mandate a new election be conducted.” 

Finley, the president and founder of West Point Thoroughbreds, ran a hotly contested autumn campaign against Violette, but lost by a vote that was reported (but not confirmed by NYTHA) as 625-611. 

In the days after his loss, Finley initially said he had no intention of protesting the outcome. But when he was “inundated” by potential NYTHA voters who claimed they had either not received ballots or received them too late to cast them, he concluded that as many as 1,000 eligible NYTHA voters might have been excluded from voting (Finley has twice revised that number upward, first to 1,500 and now 1,700). 

In his initial protest letter, Finley voiced his concerns about both the voting irregularities and the allegedly insider-ish behavior of election committee members Gallagher, Alan Foreman and Craig Gegorek. 

NYTHA responded by outlining an appeals process and scheduling a Feb. 10 closed-session hearing on the matter. Finley responded on Dec. 22 by claiming that such a hearing would not be fair because, among other complaints, he would not be able to discover opposing evidence in advance of the hearing and that he would not be allowed to either listen to witness testimony or call his own witnesses. 

The hearing process that NYTHA put in place mandated that Finley file a “comprehensive and detailed written statement” by Jan. 5, so the package filed by his attorneys appears to satisfy NYTHA's requirement in the event that the hearing proceeds as outlined. 

The Jan. 5 demand letter includes a significant new point of protest, that “NYTHA's staff impermissibly tipped the scales of the election by providing between 100 and 150 'supplemental ballots' to selected NYTHA members and others without documenting the reasons for doing so.” 

The letter alleges that because these ballots were sent out selectively to Violette supporters, they should thus be considered void “in an election that turned on only 14 votes.” 

In summing up the argument for a new election, the Jan. 5 letter concludes, “Mr. Finley has obtained sworn affidavits from at least sixteen eligible members… confirming that they were unable to vote in the election and would have voted for Mr. Finely. If…their votes had been counted, and nothing else about the NYTHA election was changed, Mr. Finley would be NYTHA's president today.”