Even if you have called before, call
Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie, 518-455-3791 (or in his Bronx district office, 718-654-6539); ask for his Secretary for Program and Policy Jennifer Best or Assistant Secretary for Program and Policy (Team Leader) Janice Nieves; or speak to whomever you can.
Assembly Election Law Chair Latrice Walker, 518-455-4466. Ask for her legislative director - or whoever manages her committee agenda.
Gov. Kathy Hochul, 518-474-8390
From Julie Weiner, NYCD 15/16 Indivisible Election Integrity Committee
At about minute 33 of this excellent analysis of the reasons the Dems lost the 2024 presidential election (if they actually did), the Left Hook's Wajahat Ali suggests that Elon Musk may have thrown the 2024 election for Trump using electronic means - citing the same admissions we all noticed:
content=watch_now_gif&r=b9qqa&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
And a few election integrity activists are asking questions about the Massie loss:
Ralph Lopez ralphlopez2008@gmail.com via citizensoversight.org
11:36 PM (22 minutes ago)
to electionintegrity
Just a little strange that Gallrein who had fewer than 100 people at his victory party while Massie had thousands even in defeat, brought out 50,000 new primary voters, double the number of voters in the last
Republican primary for that district which was contested. A perfect time for "trust but verify" as some US politician once said. All KY 4th CD is Hart Intercivic with the exception of a couple of ES&S200
counties. The last person to ask for ballot images was Dr. Shiva in a 2021 MA US Senate primary. The SecState told him they had been deleted. Shiva v. Galvin.
https://vashiva.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/11889-second-amended-complaint.pdf
Years and years later, we are still looking at the same election system we were looking at in 2016, when Hillary beat Bernie Sanders, oh, except in hand-counted precincts.
Ralph
Electronic vote-counting machines hacked in Massie primary? "Hacking Democracy."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t75xvZ3osFg
Shiva v. Galvin.
https://vashiva.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/11889-second-amended-complaint.pdf
https://x.com/Ryanmatta/status/2057210992702980405
So meanwhile, how about phoning NY Assembly Speaker Heastie 518-455-3791, and Assembly Election Law Chair Latrice Walker to urge that at least in New York, we keep verifiable ballots by passing VIVA NY, A6287 (Cunningham) / S71116 (Cleare) and A9314 (Pretlow) / S10126 (Bailey)? And the Count Every Vote Act, A4307 (Dinowitz) / S417 (Gianaris) to precisely define the trigger for election recounts - and maybe Walker’s own A6354 to deter frivolous challenges to voter qualifications?
Heastie's office on Wednesday assigned one young woman to take calls. Maybe it was only for the SMART Elections call rally that day - or maybe you'll actually get to talk to a person.
After that, if you have time for more calls:
Your own Assembly Member (click here to look up your representative’s name and number) to ask them to co-sponsor A9314, which now has a senate same-as, S10124, carried by Senator Jamaal Bailey.
Here are background notes for your calls.
Tell Speaker Heastie’s (and other electeds’) office:
I am calling to urge you to ensure that the Election Law Committee holds at least one more meeting before the end of this legislative session, and that this time, the agenda includes two urgently needed election verifiability bills: Ways and Means Chair Gary Pretlow’s A9314 (its senate same-as, S10196, is carried by Bronx/Mt Vernon Senator Jamaal Bailey) and VIVA NY, A6587 - Senate same-as for which has already passed Senate Elections Committee. [For Speaker Heastie, add:] These bills will save two important counties, Suffolk and Monroe, $34 million now, and other counties in the future possibly hundreds of millions.
VIVA NY - A6287 - is endorsed by the NYS Conference of the NAACP, the Sierra Club Atlantic Division, the Let NY Vote Coalition of over 200 trade unions and good-government organizations.
A NY Daily News opinion urged passage of VIVA NY. So has the Albany Times Union. But with the voting machine vendor’s commitment to retooling the exorbitantly expensive touchscreen voting machines banned by VIVA NY into DREs, the goal of maintaining New York State’s gold-standard hand-marked paper ballots may need to be accomplished by passing A9314’s DRE ban as well.
Speaker Heastie has said he is “open to other ways” besides raising taxes to fund cities’ necessities.
Preventing other NY counties from substituting touchscreen computers for pens in polling places could net future savings of $100-225 million - even before storage and transportation costs for giant touchscreens.
Keeping elections verifiable protects election security. With Trump and MAGA openly undermining the 2026 midterms, now is the time to IMPROVE, not undermine election security! These bills allow all New Yorkers to keep our hand-marked paper ballots, the gold standard for election verifiability and security. Most states have moved away from DREs because of their known vulnerabilities - including glitchy touchscreens (mocked in a 2008 Simpsons cartoon), time-consuming, nearly impossible logic and accuracy testing on massive numbers of touchscreens, long lines in polling places, high purchase, storage and transportation costs, and voter difficulties verifying the machines’ nearly-unreadable so called Voter “Verified” Paper Audit Trails - rendering audits and recounts unreliable as a reflection of voter intent.
If you can, when you call, please also advocate for these two election integrity bills also supported by the NAACP NYS Conference and NYCD16/15-Indivisible:
The Count Every Vote Act (CEVA) A4307/S417 has now passed the NYS Senate for the second year in a row. CEVA precisely defines the close-vote “margin of victory” trigger for hand recounts (to avoid legal disputes arising from vague language that could end up handing the courts or even Congress the opportunity to prevent a necessary recount).
A347a, the Election Commissioner Authorization Act, allows expanded audits in the event of unexplained discrepancies between audit and voting machine counts. (Currently, one partisan commissioner can veto an audit escalation; even glaring discrepancies are routinely ignored or misdocumented. This violation of NYS Election Law has been witnessed by an audit observer in Rensselaer County. [Members of NYCD16/15-Indivisible heard audit witness Chris Bystroff present his observations and attempts at whistleblowing at our October, 2025, general meeting.]
And for these urgent bills also prioritized by the LetNYVote coalition that we support:
A6354 (sponsored by Election Law Chair Latrice Walker, similar to S3233, Kavanaugh) to deter frivolous challenges to voter qualifications. Students at Vassar and Bard Colleges all had their right to vote arbitrarily challenged in the 2024 presidential election. Trump is calling for “an army” of election “protectors” who will likely multiply use of this tactic exponentially. We must impose accountability for any such challengers. This bill requires a sworn affidavit by challengers, with documentation of evidence for their challenge, and delimits the questions challenged voters can be asked.
A58476a (Gibbs)/S4602A (Gounardes) to extend voting hours in case of polling place disruptions of over 15 minutes for the same length of time voting was not possible. (There were nearly 300 bomb threats in swing states in 2024, and eight counties in NJ suffered bomb threats during their 2025 gubernatorial election. And a judge failed to grant an extension in one polling place even after a machine breakdown cost voters a full Saturday of early voting.)
FYI: Specifics of high-priority bills A6287 and A9314, and other information to be aware of when you call:
VIVA NY, the Voting Integrity and Verification Act of New York, A6287/S7116, sponsored by Assembly Member Brian Cunningham, who requested its inclusion in the budget, bans encoding votes a voter-unverifiable bar codes and requires availability in all polling places of the option to vote by hand marking a durable paper ballot. (Of course, accessible ballot-marking devices remain available as required by federal and state law in all polling places.)
This bill is also supported by the NAACP New York State Conference, Let NY Vote coalition, Public Citizen, Justice USA, the Sierra Club Atlantic Div (NYS), many other groups. A recent NY Daily News opinion piece urged passage of this bill.
A9314/S10126, Assembly Ways and Means Chair Gary Pretlow’s ban on touchscreen Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) voting machines, is now carried in the senate by Jamaal Bailey. A9314/S10126 would delete a GOP-inserted loophole from NYS election law that currently allows counties to purchase DREs. (The vendor is currently rewriting the machines’ software to convert them to DREs.) (DRE’s glitchy touchscreens were satirized on The Simpsons in 2008 when many states were still using them.)
Passing either bill quickly allows a possible refund of $34 million that two counties (Suffolk and Monroe) misguidedly allocated (above the cost of purchasing updated versions of their current scanners and BMDs that can read voter-friendly ballots) for exorbitantly expensive DRE-like touchscreen voting machines that violate the Voter Friendly Ballot Act all Dems voted for in 2019, now part of NYS Election Law.
Future savings could run well above $100 million by preventing other counties from doubling or tripling their election expenses by wasting millions of dollars to replace pens and paper ballots in polling places with massive arrays of exorbitantly expensive touchscreens. [DRE stands for Direct Recording Electronic - voting machines with no ballots, only electronic “marks” on computer or removable drives. Paper “audit trails” don’t make up for the absence of paper ballots because voters seldom actually verify them. They are theoretically voter verifiable, but not voter-verified. NYS election law requires voter-verified ballots.]
Hand-marked paper ballots (HMPBs) are the only ballots automatically verified by the voter. Studies show that paper audit trails or ballot summary cards like those produced by the touchscreens Suffolk and Monroe will use if these bills fail are rarely fully reviewed by voters, who almost never spend enough time to review all candidate names printed on the cards. Voters intuitively feel they have reviewed their ballots when they carefully review checkmarks they’ve made on the touchscreen, not realizing that the only durable evidence of their votes will be that little strip of paper off to the side with a list of names in hard-to-read single-spaced format.
Hand marked paper ballots allow for determination of voter intent for each vote, enabling reversal of any miscounts and reassuring losing candidates that all ballots included their name. Paper “audit trails,” because they are not reliably verified by each voter, can never accurately be assumed to express voter intent. And when used in audits or recounts, they can never reassure losing candidates that they actually lost their race, because they can’t prove that the touchscreen actually showed the names of all candidates in a race to each voter.