Election Day was Tuesday, though if you happen to be one of the people who still read the print edition of the Staten Island Advance, you might be confused. The Tuesday edition put campaign stickers for Staten Island district attorney candidate Republican Joan Illuzzi on its front page that called on residents to “vote tomorrow,” at which point it would be Wednesday and, unfortunately for Joan Illuzzi, all of the senior-citizen volunteers would have packed up the poll machines and been long gone.
Joan Illuzzi, it turns out, lost this election. Her Democratic rival, and former city councilman and congressman, Michael McMahon won with about 55 percent of the vote.
Illuzzi’s campaign blamed the Advance for the mix-up, saying they’d sent “vote tomorrow” stickers for Monday and “vote today” for Tuesday. The campaign told the Post they were still pretty sure people would figure it out, but that was before the returns came in.
Voter turnout was pretty low citywide, according to officials, though the Staten Island DA’s race was one of the more contested. The position was left open after the former DA Dan Donovan won a seat in the House of Representatives in a special election to fill the space vacated by ex-lawmaker Michael Grimm, who is a little over a month into his eight-month prison sentence for federal tax-fraud charges. DA-elect McMahon had served a two-year term in Congress until he was ousted by Grimm in 2010, making Staten Island politics look like a very weird game of musical chairs.
The Staten Island Advance did officially endorse Illuzzi on its editorial pages last month, so we can probably just blame the sticker guy for the mix-up. His (or her) identity remains unknown.
