Five months ago, a Democratic political candidate and triathlete from Long Island took a nighttime ocean swim. He was not heard from again.
For weeks, drones, divers and beach-walkers searched for the candidate, Petros Krommidas, but eventually his family and colleagues presumed him dead.
His political foes do not agree.
Republicans have managed to keep Democrats from replacing his name on the ballot and this week, a judge ruled that Mr. Krommidas, 29, would still be running in November for a seat in the Nassau County Legislature, despite his disappearance.
“He really believed in the system, and was running to make a difference and help people,” said Ellen Lederer-DeFrancesco, a friend and political colleague. She said Mr. Krommidas, though a political novice, had a gentle, natural touch with voters and was quickly gaining name recognition. “He’d be horrified that people were using him this way.”
County Democrats moved a month ago to replace Mr. Krommidas with another candidate to challenge the incumbent, Patrick Mullaney, a Republican. But the county board of elections, which is run jointly by a Democratic and a Republican commissioner, split on the issue and two Republican voters sued to block the replacement.
They argued that Mr. Krommidas was still officially considered missing, not dead, and therefore could not be replaced.
A person must be missing for three years to be declared deceased by a court, the voters argued in the lawsuit, filed in State Supreme Court in Nassau County. On Monday, Justice Gary F. Knobel agreed and ordered election officials to leave Mr. Krommidas’s name on the ballot.
Mr. Krommidas “has not been located, his body has not been found and there has been no legal declaration of his death or a proceeding commenced to that effect,” the judge wrote.
Republican election officials, while voicing regret, say the law is the law. While supporting the voters’ suit, they told their Democratic counterparts that “if there were any way to remove his name from the ballot legally, we’d be willing to do that,” said Mike Deery, a spokesman for the Nassau County Republican Committee. But, he said, there is not.
The standoff has delayed the completion and distribution of ballots for absentee, military and other voters. Democrats said they would most likely appeal the judge’s decision before early voting begins this month in the district, which includes a swath of southwest Nassau County.
Mr. Krommidas, who was training for a triathlon and often took long ocean swims after work, disappeared after one in late April in Long Beach.
His phone, keys and clothing were found on the beach and his car remained parked on a nearby street.
It was “completely out of character for him not to respond,” his mother wrote a few days later on Facebook, imploring people to help search for him.
“Let’s bring our Petey home,” she wrote. His family did not respond to messages seeking comment.
The authorities did not suspect foul play, and after weeks of searching, his friends and family began to accept that he had most likely drowned.
Democrats eventually decided to replace Mr. Krommidas, a first-time candidate who attended Columbia University and worked in finance, with James Hodge, a community advocate from Long Beach, for the seat.
But they waited several months to avoid causing further discomfort to Mr. Krommidas’s grieving family, said Jay Jacobs, the Democratic Party chairman for both Nassau County and New York State. He called Republican election officials “heartless” to oppose the replacement.
Waiting three years for a court declaration “is not reasonable in an election situation where the preponderance of evidence is that this young man is dead,” he said. “If somebody is missing for that period of time, do you really think he was afraid of running for office and decided to skip town?”
John Ryan, a lawyer representing the county’s Republican elections commissioner, said the fault lay with the Democrats. They failed to file their application for a replacement candidate by the deadline, which was the June 24 primary. Everything else, he said, is irrelevant.
“Even if they tried to do it in a timely manner, they could not, on the basis that he was not legally dead,” he said.
The situation comes as Democrats are seeking to gain seats in the Republican-controlled legislature in this New York City suburb, where the national MAGA movement has widened an existing partisan divide.
Delia DeRiggi-Whitton, a Democrat who is the Legislature’s minority leader, called the election pivotal in keeping Republicans from gaining a supermajority in the 19-seat body.
She called Republican efforts to keep Mr. Krommidas on the ballot “a cruel political game.”
“They’d rather a missing man’s name remain on the ballot than give voters a real choice,” Ms. DeRiggi-Whitton said. “They’re doing it for their political advantage and putting that in front of the feelings of the family.”
Mr. Deery, the Republican spokesman, dismissed that characterization.
“We would never play politics when it comes to somebody being deceased — this really was a question of what the law would allow,” he said.
It is not unheard-of for a dead candidate to remain on a ballot.
In 2018, Dennis Hof, a reality TV star and brothel owner, won a Nevada state legislature seat despite dying three weeks before the election. And in 2022 in Pennsylvania, Anthony DeLuca was re-elected to the state legislature despite dying from lymphoma a month beforehand.
Justice Knobel, in his Monday decision in the Nassau County case, cited the case of Nicholas Begich Sr., who won a 1972 congressional election in Alaska despite having disappeared weeks earlier in a plane crash. He was later pronounced dead and his opponent won the seat in a special election.
Keith Corbett, a lawyer representing Democratic election officials, said that if Mr. Krommidas somehow garners the most votes on Nov. 4, a special election will ensue to fill the seat.
Ms. Lederer-DeFrancesco wondered whether Mr. Krommidas’s widely reported disappearance might result in enough name recognition and sympathy to backfire on Republicans.
“I’d love to see him win,” she said.
Corey Kilgannon is a Times reporter who writes about crime and criminal justice in and around New York City, as well as breaking news and other feature stories.
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