"Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart Cousins... described the recent errors on the part of the New York City Board of Elections... a “national embarrassment” and pledged to hold legislative hearings this summer to develop reform proposals. ...The first State Senate hearing is expected to take place at Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn on July 28th with additional hearings scheduled for other localities in the final week of July and first week in August. ...“We're going to go out to Syracuse and Rochester. We're going to hear from Westchester, Hudson Valley, and Long Island voters about what they think should be changed,” said Myrie.
https://gothamist.com/news/ny-senate-plans-statewide-hearings-elections-voters-taking-center-stage
NY Senate Plans Statewide Hearings On Elections With Voters Taking Center Stage
BY BRIGID BERGIN, WNYC
JULY 12, 2021 5:46 P.M. • 9 COMMENTS
After a tumultuous primary election season in New York City that is renewing perennial calls to overhaul how the state runs its elections, the head of the New York State Senate Elections Committee, State Senator Zellnor Myrie of Brooklyn, announced plans on Monday to hold a series of hearings across the state to gather input from voters about their experiences at the polls.
“We're going to go out to Syracuse and Rochester. We're going to hear from Westchester, Hudson Valley, and Long Island voters about what they think should be changed,” said Myrie during an appearance on The Brian Lehrer Show. “So it won't just be a panel of experts and folks who work in this space regularly. We're going to hear from the voters,” he added.
The announcement made good on a commitment from Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart Cousins who described the recent errors on the part of the New York City Board of Elections when they released and then retracted faulty ranked-choice voting tallies as a “national embarrassment” and pledged to hold legislative hearings this summer to develop reform proposals.
The first State Senate hearing is expected to take place at Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn on July 28th with additional hearings scheduled for other localities in the final week of July and first week in August. Myrie said the process will culminate in Albany in September at a hearing that will also feature testimony from experts in election administration and good government.
These State Senate hearings come in addition to one previously announced by the Assemblymember Latrice Walker, who chairs that chamber’s Election Law Committee, specifically on the topic of ranked-choice voting. That hearing is scheduled for Monday, July 19th at 250 Broadway in Manhattan.
Myrie, whose 20th Senate district overlaps in Brownsville, Brooklyn, with Walker’s Assembly district, said while he thinks the issues with election administration go beyond the city’s implementation of ranked-choice voting, he also said it was still something worth examining. But also he pointed to problems in other localities across the state, particularly related to the implementation of early voting.
Case in point: last month, State Attorney General Letitia James announced she won a lawsuit against Rensselaer County over its refusal to establish an early voting site in Troy, the most populous city in the county with the largest population of people of color. That decision forced the Rensselaer County Board of Elections to establish an early voting site in Troy ahead of the June primary.
Most changes to the structure of the city’s Board of Elections, specifically related to its bipartisan composition, would require a state constitutional amendment which would need to pass both chambers of the state legislature in two consecutive legislative sessions before going before the voters as a ballot referendum, a three-year process that could take until 2024 at the earliest.
While the hearings are a first step in a reform process, Myrie voiced hope that there were other “tweaks” to election law that could improve the process sooner.
“My mantra has been taking New York from worst to first,” said Myrie, “and we are going to continue to live by that as we go through these hearings.”
9 Comments
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FunTimesNYC • a day ago
Throw the bums out. Seriously. What a giant waste of flesh the BOE is. After this last incredibly poor job, it's clear. We deserve better.
redbike • a day ago
Eric Adams wasn't amongst my ranked choices for mayor.
But.
Ranked-choice voting in NYC is IMHO a success.
The failure is NYC's / NY State's Boards of Elections. Don't falsely conflate RCV with the Boards of Elections.
Yoyi redbike • a day ago
Agree. But cynical politicians have a knack for presenting what is in their best interests (the old system in which machine approved candidates could eek out a plurality) as the nobler option.
redbike Yoyi • a day ago
Agreed, which is why when this question has popped up in the past, I've flogged how NY State voters blew it in 2017: failing to call a Constitutional Convention. (NY State's Constitution's Article II — “Suffrage” — is what establishes the state's Boards of Elections.) Yes, the state's legislature can (after 2 successive legislative sessions have voted in favor) place amendments to the state constitution on the ballot, but, as you point out, state legislators will craft ANYTHING / EVERYTHING to favor their interests first. My trust in NY State's legislature is not high.
ms_elusive redbike • 7 hours ago
Another thing the state legislature can change are NY's closed primaries that require you to affiliate super early.
𝔅𝔢𝔢𝔩𝔷𝔢𝔟𝔲𝔟𝔟𝔞 • a day ago • edited
Maybe they can find out why the Manhattan DA contest was on my ballot in Brooklyn?
J C • a day ago • edited
At least this time (June 22nd 2021) I didn't have to swear to my name in the presence of the poll worker signing in voters.That's an utterly illegal request which has been made of me every time I've voted since probably 2017.
(And no, I am not an unvalidated name in the federal voter database; that's the only time an NY poll worker is to ask a voter to swear to his/her name, or ask for ID, when the voter is signing in on an election day.)
For the 2020 general election, the woman making the illegal demand was highly obnoxious and next to incompetent. She went so far as to say: You could be committing voter fraud. Since I'd voted early, I made an effort to ask that she be fired immediately.
MyDogHatesItHere • a day ago
Worked my local polling station and can vouch that the machines are total pieces of cud. People waited so much longer than they needed to bc they kept malfunctioned which would then require an official BOE technician to come which required at least an hour and when he arrived he had some insane plumber's crack.
J C MyDogHatesItHere • a day ago
But the machines aren't new.
I've seen one out of service once at my regular polling place, but that was at least 3 years ago.
I've never had any trouble putting my ballot into one of the machines to have my votes scanned to a digital file.
The most trouble I've ever had with one of the machines was the first time I used one in NY (I'd first used a similar scan the ballot machine 30 years ago in Minnesota), when the attendant couldn't answer the basic question: Does it matter which side of my ballot is up?