Thirty-four down, 2,636 left to go.
David Pechefsky, the Green Party’s candidate for the Council seat being vacated by Bill DeBlasio, wasted little time on Tuesday, beginning his longshot effort to represent Park Slope and Windsor Terrace by setting up a table at the Seventh Avenue F train station.
He has one month — starting from yesterday morning — to collect 2,700 signatures, and got his first 34 in about two hours. (Democratic candidates need only collect 900 names.)
Of course, there’s a catch: To be considered valid, the signature cannot appear on anyone else’s petitions — and the five Democrats in the race have already spent a month seeking every last John Hancock.
“Some people said they’d already signed for someone else, but it wasn’t as bad as we’d expected,” Pechefsky, a former Council staffer, said after his first two hours.
Pechefsky said he realizes that collecting clean signatures on the street is an uphill battle. So soon, volunteers will be knocking on the doors of independents — who actually outnumber registered Republicans nearly two-to-one in the overwhelmingly Democratic 39th district.
“If you registered as ‘no party,’ you’ll probably be hearing from us,” he said.
At this point, it’s unclear if Pechefsky can get the signatures he needs. But he said he’ll be back at his table all weekend, fighting to get on the ballot as a Green candidate in one of the most liberal neighborhoods in the city.
