Assembly Majority Leader Crystal Peoples-Stokes’ announcement Wednesday that she will not seek re-election permits her chosen successor — Buffalo Common Council Majority Leader Leah Halton-Pope — to ascend to the seat with no opposition.

Halton-Pope, a long-time aide to Peoples-Stokes, will in turn leave vacant the Ellicott District seat she has occupied since January 2024. That seat, too, is likely to be filled with little or no competition, according to attorney Paul Wolf, an advocate for electoral reform who has railed against political machinations that deprive voters of choices.

“This is not how elections should work and it is another example of why the public is sick of politics as usual,” said Wolf, founder of New York Coalition for Open Government.

Word spread Tuesday that Peoples-Stokes, 75, would decline to seek a 13th term — just a day after she’d presented the Erie County Board of Elections a nominating petition qualifying her for the Democratic primary ballot in June.

She made it official at a press conference Wednesday afternoon, explaining that a medical condition precluded her running for a 13th term. She declined to provide particulars when questioned by reporters.

Peoples-Stokes also did not directly respond to questions from reporters as to the timing of her withdrawal. She referred to the process in place to select her successor as a “perfectly legal process and does not necessarily break any rules.”

She said she has made her preference known to Democratic Party leaders.

“When I did talk to Jeremy Zellner, I suggested to him that it should be Leah Halton-Pope, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to happen.”

Dropping out now, after the deadline to file nominating petitions, effectively clears the path for Halton-Pope to succeed Peoples-Stokes without competition.

Here’s how that works:

• Candidates for elected office spent the month of March collecting signatures to qualify for their party’s primary ballot. Those signatures, collected in what’s called a nominating petition under New York’s arcane election laws, were due Monday.
• No aspiring office-holder, Democrat or Republican, was likely to take on Peoples-Stokes. She’s popular in her district and among the most powerful lawmakers in Albany. That combination rendered her nearly unbeatable in a state where incumbents rarely lose re-election. 
• Indeed, by Monday’s deadline, no other candidate had filed a nominating petition to run in the Assembly district she has represented since 2003. That meant Peoples-Stokes would skip the primary and appear alone on November’s general election ballot.
• And then, two days after the filing deadline, she dropped out.

New York’s election law provides a contingency in the event candidates who have qualified for the ballot but are unable or unwilling to run. 

All nominating petitions are required to include the names of people who constitute the candidate’s committee on vacancies. That committee has the power to choose another person to appear on the ballot in her place.

That’s exactly what will happen here. Peoples-Stokes’s committee on vacancies will meet — I’m told on Sunday — and choose Halton-Pope as a substitute candidate. Because the deadline to file nominating petitions has passed, Halton-Pope will face no opposition unless someone chooses to run as an independent.

“They have time to file independent petitions. They just won’t be able to run on the Democratic line,” Peoples-Stokes said.

Independent candidates rarely, if ever, win races for the state legislature. To qualify for the general election ballot, they must collect at least 1,500 valid signatures — three times the number required of candidates seeking the nomination of an established party.