This much is certain: Helen Gambichler is running for office.

She is the Queens Democratic Party bosses’ nominee for a spot on a little-known body called the Democratic County Committee.

County committee members are the very blades of grass of grass-roots politics in New York, the worker ants of participatory democracy. There are more than 1,100 Democratic committee members in Queens alone, most representing only a few blocks, all of them unpaid. Collectively, though, they have the power — at least in theory — to choose candidates for higher office and even determine party policy.

There is just one problem: Ms. Gambichler, a 72-year-old retired court clerk, did not know she was running for anything. Nor does she wish to run. “I have no idea what that’s about,” she said.

She had been nominated, without her knowledge, by the borough’s Democratic Party leadership, which is struggling to maintain control after the longtime Queens party chairman, Representative Joseph Crowley, was trounced by the left-leaning insurgent Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in a June Congressional primary that sent tremors through the Democratic establishment nationwide.