NY’s voting rights gaps

In its own ways, New York hinders voting rights. Lawmakers must fix this.

Looking around the country at blatant voter suppression efforts and even attempts to pass laws to let legislatures override election outcomes that aren’t to their liking, New Yorkers might be tempted to feel a bit smug about their embrace of voting rights.

They may want to hold that hubris a bit — especially in the Capital Region, the site of some of the most glaring electoral abuses in the state.

Those abuses included a history of racial gerrymandering by Democrats in the Albany County Legislature that resulted in three lawsuits over the past 25 years; the creation of polling places in Rensselaer County that were purposely inconvenient for traditionally Democratic-leaning minority voters in Troy; and voter intimidation, again in Rensselaer County, where authorities threatened to share voter registration data with immigration authorities.

Around the state, notes the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law School, some communities perpetuate at-large elections that tend to keep minority neighborhoods from gaining representation. Others, particularly on Long Island, limit polling places in minority areas, resulting in long lines and discouraging waits at the polls.

To its credit, New York has in recent years improved some of its voting laws, allowing same-day voter registration, early voting, pre-registration for 16- and 17-year-olds, automatic voter registration for people who deal with the state Health and Motor Vehicles departments, campus polling places, and easy transferring of voter registration when a person moves.

The state, though, needs to do more, and it has an opportunity to do it right now. Waiting in the Legislature is the John Lewis Voting Rights Act of New York, named for the late U.S. senator and icon of the civil rights movement. If the bill’s name sounds familiar, it’s similar to federal legislation that failed in the U.S. Senate in the face of Republican opposition and a refusal by several Democrats to support changing filibuster rules, even to protect such fundamental rights.

The New York act would, among other things, require any jurisdiction in the state with a history of voter suppression or other forms of discrimination to clear changes to its voting practices with the state attorney general or a court. It would establish new protections against voter intimidation, deception and obstruction, and direct courts to interpret election laws in a pro-voter way, rather than disenfranchise them with legalistic gotchas.

With elections for statewide and legislative posts coming later this year, the Legislature needs to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Act of New York before the session ends in early June. It should also set in motion, again, the process of changing the state constitution to allow no-excuse absentee voting, a worthy cause that was undone by a Republican campaign of misinformation. Votes by two successive legislatures are needed to put an amendment on the ballot. A first vote this year could allow voters to reconsider it in 2023.

This would mark some of the strongest voting rights protection in the country — surely a better claim to fame than being a poster child for voting rights abuses. That’s a title we should gladly cede to some other deserving state. And an example New York should set for the nation.