The Independent View: Problem with Voting Rights in NY

Jeffrey Toobin has been a Staff Writer at The New Yorker since 1993 and the Senior Legal Analyst for CNN since 2002. He wrote about Voting in New York in this comment "The Problem with Voting Rights in New York".

It’s a truism of modern politics that Republicans have placed voting rights under assault in the states they control. Ever since the G.O.P. landslides in the midterm elections of 2010, Republicans have worked to restrict the right to vote in a variety of ways—by cutting back on opportunities for early voting, making absentee voting more difficult, and imposing photo-I.D. requirements at the polls, to name only the best known methods. In 2013, in Shelby County v. Holder, the Supreme Court, with a majority of 5–4, gave Republicans the green light to continue their efforts by gutting the Voting Rights Act. The Shelby decision effectively ended the federal government’s supervision of voting rights in states, mostly in the South, that had histories of discriminating against minority voters.

It would be easy to conclude, based on this familiar story, that the contemporary struggle for voting rights is just another battle in the old fight of white Southerners who want to keep African-Americans from the polls. This view is not necessarily wrong, but it’s certainly incomplete, because the state with one of the worst records on voting rights is the nation’s great citadel of liberalism: New York.

For example, the Justice Department and liberal public-interest groups have charged that the decision by Republican-led states to cut back on early voting represents a form of discrimination against minority voters. So has early voting been cut back in New York? No—because the state does not allow any early voting. New York is one of only thirteen states that has no provision for early voting, and instead employs the archaic practice of giving voters only two choices: show up at the polls on Election Day or vote by absentee ballot.

But the disgrace of New York’s voting laws only begins there. New York not only lacks same-day voter registration—a valuable reform—but it requires voters to register at least twenty-five days before Election Day, which presents a meaningful barrier to many voters who want to participate. (Fourteen states and the District of Columbia allow same-day voter registration.) In addition, absentee voting is a cumbersome process in New York, which requires snail-mail exchanges between the voter and the local Board of Elections. (No e-mail requests are allowed for absentee voting.) It’s little wonder, then, that New York ranks forty-sixth in voter turnout.

Indeed, New York’s voting procedures have become a talking point for Republican-led states in defending their own regression on voting rights. In discussing their limitations on voting rights, North Carolina and Ohio have pointed to the New York rules. If other states can have restrictive policies, the argument goes, why can’t they? As John Kasich, the governor of Ohio, said when asked about his state’s decision to cut early voting from six weeks to four, “I do not know why you are picking on Ohio. Why don’t you go pick on New York?”

Various proposals for reform have floated around the New York state legislature, a notoriously corrupt and ineffective body, but nothing has happened. The reasons for the inaction seem clear. Incumbent politicians benefit from low-turnout, low-interest elections, in which few people muster the enthusiasm or effort to vote. The public rarely displays much interest in the mechanics of elections, so politicians can establish self-serving rules with political impunity. Thus, the status quo endures.

The dismal situation in New York does not, of course, excuse the retrogression on voting rights that has taken place elsewhere in recent years, almost of all it initiated by Republicans. Rather, New York is a reminder that politicians everywhere, when left to their own devices, will put their own interests ahead of those of the people they are supposed to serve.

But it goes even further:

- No Early Voting.

- Absentee Ballot, you have to know you will be out-of-state or sick/in hospital on Election day. Does not allow No-Excuse Absentee Voting.

- An obscure bit of election law (Section 5-304) requires voters to change their Party enrollment prior to the Registration deadline for the General Election in November the Year before the next Primary, giving New York the earliest Change-of-Party deadline of the 11 U.S. States with a Closed Primary system. New York is also the only State among those 11 where the deadline doesn't fall within the same calendar year as the Primary.

- NY is a Closed Primary State and 2,485,475 independent voters, called BLANKs, can not Vote in any Primary. The Independence Party can allow them to participate in their Primary, but only on selected Primaries, if they decide to open them.