Vote for better N.Y. balloting
The coming new year will provide a crucial public indication of whether New York Democrats are serious about enacting progressive change — or just posturing and blowing hot air. Gov. Cuomo’s upcoming State of the State speech will include a call for three simple, common-sense reforms to New York’s convoluted electoral system. His plan would enact same-day voter registration, a two-week early voting period and automatic registration of eligible voters.
Those three reforms would change the face of power in our state by bringing thousands more citizens — possibly, millions — into the voting booth. It would help end New York’s status as a national embarrassment when it comes to voting.
And it would add a welcome note of consistency to New York’s Democratic progressives, who are quick to criticize voter suppression in places like Texas, North Carolina and Alabama, but slow to move the needle even a tiny bit in their own state.
Consider how far New York has fallen from high points like the contests for mayor in 1953 and 1957, both of which saw more than 90% of the city’s registered voters cast ballots, according to the 2016 report of the Board of Elections.
It’s been a downward spiral ever since. The 1993 general election, when Rudy Giuliani defeated incumbent David Dinkins, was the last time more than half the city’s registered voters turned out for a mayoral contest.
Only 35% of eligible active city voters came out in last year’s presidential primaries, and a dismal 10% made it to the polls to vote in primaries for state offices in 2016.
One big contributor to the low turnout is the tangled web of New York laws that deliberately make it difficult — and at times impossible — to register and vote.
New Yorkers cannot, for example, simply change enrollment from one political party to another. The change has to be done prior to the last previous general election, meaning it won’t take effect for several months.
New Yorkers cannot simply cast an absentee ballot. In a complex two-step process, voting absentee requires a written request to the Board of Elections, which must approve the reason and then supply the absentee ballot. We are one of only 13 states that don’t allow citizens to show up early and either cast a vote or request an absentee ballot with no excuse needed.
The President of the United States and members of his family learned about New York’s voter-hostile system the hard way. In the 2016 Republican presidential primary, Ivanka Trump and Eric Trump were unable to vote for their father: They ran afoul of the law that would have required them to switch party affiliations to Republican a full six months before the primary.
This year, the Trumps got tripped up again: First Lady Melania Trump sent in a prior request for an absentee ballot and supplied an acceptable excuse (namely, that she would be in the White House and unable to vote in New York).
But she apparently overlooked the clear-as-mud instruction on the ballot that said: “Sign and date the back of the envelope. Seal the envelope and put it in the larger envelope that is addressed to the Board of Elections. Mail or deliver your ballot to your borough Board of Elections office.”
The First Lady forgot to sign the envelope, so her vote wasn’t counted. “If any of the information is missing (the ballot) is invalid,” a Board of Elections bureaucrat told the Daily News.
The vote of Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, also got blown up in the election minefield. She mailed her absentee ballot on Election Day, which — so sorry! — turns out to be too late.
That these convoluted laws remain on the books should be a point of great personal embarrassment to officeholders throughout New York, Democrat and Republican alike. But it especially falls to Democrats to fix the problem. Dems hold every statewide office and the lower house of the Legislature, and have raised a great howling cry over wanting to control the state Senate as well.
Very well, then. Democrats of all stripes — from the leftist Working Families Party to the wheeler-dealers in the Independent Democratic Conference — should agree to support Cuomo’s three reforms without qualification or conditions.
They should also demand that Cuomo isolate election reforms from all other Albany legislation and present them in a simple bill for an up-or-down vote. Then we’ll see whether Dems really support voting rights or are content with the current state of confusion.