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City Council Considers Manhattan Board of Elections Nominee Who Ruled in Ranked-Choice Voting Case


City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams (photo: John McCarten/NYC Council Media Unit)


Some members of the New York City Council continue to have questions about ranked-choice voting, the new voter-approved system that went into effect in 2021 for party primary and special elections for city government positions. Council members aired those concerns at a hearing on Wednesday as they questioned a nominee to become a commissioner at the New York City Board of Elections. The nominee, Carol Edmead, is a State Supreme Court judge who once ruled against a City Council-led lawsuit opposing ranked-choice voting. 

Ranked-choice voting (RCV), also known as instant-runoff voting, was overwhelmingly approved by 73.5% of voters in a 2019 ballot measure that amended the City Charter. RCV allows voters to rank up to five candidates in primary and special elections by choice of preference. If no candidate crosses the 50% threshold with first-choice votes in the first round, the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated and their voters’ second-choice votes are reallocated. The process, intended to ensure the winner has a broad base of support, continues until a winner is crowned.

The first ranked-choice election was held in February 2021, in a special election for City Council District 24 in Queens. But in the months prior to that election, six members of the Council’s Black, Latino, and Asian Caucus, all Democrats, sued to stop its implementation, citing concerns about the pandemic’s disruption and arguing that the Board of Elections had failed to adequately educate voters about the system, which could subsequently disenfranchise racial minorities.

But Edmead, a retiring Manhattan Supreme Court Judge and ally of Manhattan Democratic county leader Keith Wright, refused the Council members’ plea ahead of the special election and eventually struck down the lawsuit in May 2021. On Wednesday, Edmead found herself facing questions about that decision at a hearing of the Council’s Committee on Rules, Privileges and Elections, which was considering her nomination to the Board of Elections as a Democratic commissioner from Manhattan. As required by state law, the New York City Board of Elections has one Democratic and one Republican commissioner from each borough, officials who are nominated through their local party establishments and confirmed at the City Council.

“For the past almost quarter-century, I have served the people of the City and State of New York as a jurist, following justice and fairness through law,” Edmead said in her opening remarks, noting that she spent the last decade overseeing election law disputes. “My goal, if appointed to the Board of Elections as a commissioner, is to serve all the people of the City of New York without prejudice or preference,” she added.

When Edmead was presiding over the RCV lawsuit, the BLA Caucus was led by Council Member I. Daneek Miller, who has been term-limited out of office, and Council Member Adrienne Adams, a Queens Democrat who became the Council speaker last year. The other members who signed onto the lawsuit were Council Members Laurie Cumbo, Robert Cornegy Jr., Alicka Ampry-Samuel, and Farah Louis, who is the only one of the four still in the Council. Opinions were divided within the caucus itself – several other members endorsed the new voting system. 

At the hearing on Wednesday, under questioning from Speaker Adams about her most recent decisions on election law, Edmead cited the RCV case. “As in all cases, I followed the law, applied the law, and made a decision. And that's what anyone should expect from a judge,” she said.

Edmead would not say whether or how RCV could be improved. “Whether rank-choice voting needs to be tweaked, needs to be adjusted, or is not the right thing at all needs to be fully considered, researched with input from people, town hall meetings, real information sharing before any action is taken,” she said. 

But she did say she would require more than anecdotal evidence to conclude whether voters rejected the new voting process. 

In May 2022, the New York City Campaign Finance Board released its 2021-2022 Voter Analysis Report, and found that voters embraced ranked-choice voting, with more than 90% of them ranking more than one candidate in at least one primary race. Democrats used ranked-choice at higher rates than Republicans. The only improvement that the CFB recommended was in reporting RCV results by publicizing a reporting schedule and reorganizing the cast vote record to help researchers analyze it. 

The recommendation on publicizing a result schedule stemmed from the BOE’s mishandling of the release of the first round of votes in the citywide primary in June 2021, which included 135,000 test votes that were erroneously included. 

In an analysis of the 2021 primary, Fair Vote, a nonpartisan group that promotes RCV nationally, found that 87% of voters ranked multiple candidates for mayor and 46% of voters used all five ranking spots on their ballot. In other races, a median of 67% ranked multiple candidates. In 49 out of 52 primary races, the first-round leader was the eventual victor, proving that they were the most representative candidate. And in 3 races, a candidate came from behind to win, showing broader consensus in later rounds. 

Citizens Union, a good government group, also pointed to several benefits from RCV in that election including fewer “wasted” ballots, more victories for women and candidates of color, more women running for office and higher voter turnout, to name a few.  

An exit poll conducted by Common Cause/NY and Rank the Vote NYC right after the election found that 78% of New Yorkers said they understood RCV extremely or very well and 77% said they want RCV in future elections.

Voting rights and election advocates overwhelmingly support RCV, which they say encourages candidates to campaign more broadly outside their base and gives voters greater choice and voice in elections. Far from disenfranchising communities of color, studies have found that RCV has helped them have greater influence and that it has helped elect minority candidates to office in other jurisdictions while also boosting women. The city’s first RCV election led to the first-ever female majority in the City Council, with 31 out of 51 seats occupied by women.  

Council Member Shekar Krishnan is among the new members who were elected in 2021, and the first South Asian representative on the Council. “[T]he reality is that we are seeing the most representative and diverse City Council that we’ve ever had in its history, and turnout that is far higher than it’s been in many other previous years, which to me says that ranked-choice voting really worked,” he said in an NY1 interview in July 2021, after winning his primary.

Despite the data, Speaker Adams still has her reservations. “As one of many who questioned the implementation of ranked-choice voting, my belief is still that education was not appropriate to those that ranked-choice voting was meant to serve,” she said at the hearing.   

There is some weight to her concerns. An analysis by Politico New York showed that wealthier, whiter neighborhoods were more likely to more extensively use ranked-choice voting than low-income communities of color. 

“My opinion is that the data was in the voting itself…People of the City of New York spoke and chose not to use it in way too many cases for my druthers, but that's just my opinion,” she added. 

Mayor Eric Adams, who was then-Brooklyn borough president and running for City Hall, has previously expressed concerns that the system was being rushed into place despite having supporting it. “Everyone knows that every layer you put in place in the process, you lose Black and brown voters and participation,” Adams told Politico New York in a November 2020 interview. “We can’t disenfranchise those voters.” Frank Carone, Adams’ close ally and mayoral chief of staff for his first year in office, represented the Council members in court in the case that Edmead ruled on.

At Wednesday’s hearing, Speaker Adams’ concerns were echoed by Council Member Selvena Brooks-Powers, a Queens Democrat who won the February 2021 special election with first-time ranked-choice voting implementation. Brooks-Powers, who is Black, emerged victorious in a crowded field of nine candidates, after nine rounds of votes being counted, ahead of Pesach Osina, who is white, in second place. RCV seemed to benefit Brooks-Powers, helping as intended to eliminate the potential spoiler effect as several other Black candidates ran in the predominantly Black district. 

Nonetheless, she said the BOE did not conduct any significant voter education ahead of that special election and that the campaigns themselves had to take on that responsibility. “A lot of it rested on [community-based organizations] doing the work, or the candidates having enough money to do mailers to communicate that to voters, and I thought that was a misstep by the Board of Elections,” she said, insisting that it was an “injustice” not to pause the implementation of RCV. The BOE, the Campaign Finance Board and DemocracyNYC subsequently undertook a concerted effort ahead of the citywide primary to inform and educate voters. 

Edmead agreed that the BOE should conduct earlier outreach about RCV. “Can it be done, and more effectively, more efficiently, and early, and in every kind of language, in language that everybody can understand? There's no reason it can’t,” she said. “And it should be, and it should be a mandate, an early mandate.”

The New York City Board of Elections, an independent body that manages the city’s elections, is composed of ten commissioners, one each selected by the Democratic and Republican parties in every borough and then appointed by the City Council. Edmead was nominated by the Manhattan Democratic Party on January 4 (Wright also made a prior nomination that has not yet moved forward). If the Council does not act within 30 days of that nomination, the Council’s Democratic members from Manhattan can then choose to approve Edmead’s appointment. She would then serve the remainder of a four-year term that ends December 31, 2024.

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by Samar Khurshid, senior reporter, Gotham Gazette
     

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Note - This article has been updated to note that Manhattan Democratic Party Chair Keith Wright did not withdraw a second BOE nominee. The Council has not yet acted on that prior nomination. 

City Council Passes New Disclosure Requirements for Spending to Influence Votes on Ballot Referendums


Passing out ballot info (photo: John McCarten/NYC Council Media Unit)


Update: The New York City Council passed the campaign finance amendment on January 19, 2022.

The New York City Council is set to pass legislation this week that would require entities spending to influence voters in local referendums to disclose their funders.

The law would close a loophole in the city's campaign finance law that lawmakers, good government groups, and campaign finance regulators have decried for years. If signed by the mayor, so-called independent expenditures (IEs) of $5,000 or more would be subject to disclosure to the New York City Campaign Finance Board. As would the names of the owners and officers of the entity behind the spending, and the names of its major contributors – the same requirements that currently apply to IE spending for or against candidate campaigns.

The legislation, which would amend the City Charter, would also require ads for or against ballot questions to include a "paid for by" notice, including the names of up to three of its top donors.

Movement on the bill comes after several years of prominent ballot questions in New York City, including three charter revision commissions that put amendments on the ballot in 2018, 2019, and 2022, including ranked-choice voting in certain local elections, expanding police oversight, and strengthening the city's public campaign matching fund system.

"Ballot proposals have major implications for New York City, including by making amendments to our charter. That's why spending on ballot measures should be subject to the same disclosure requirements as spending on candidates," said City Council Member Selvena Brooks-Powers, a Queens Democrat and lead sponsor of the bill, Int. 855, in a statement to Gotham Gazette. "Int 855 would get rid of this anti-democratic discrepancy in our election laws and improve transparency."

Unlike campaign spending directly by a candidate committee, independent expenditures made without coordination with a candidate campaign are held a protected form of speech by the U.S. Supreme Court and cannot be subject to limits. But they can be subject to disclosure about their funding sources and activity and over the years city law has required more reporting to the Campaign Finance Board (CFB).

Good government groups say extending those requirements to ballot referendums is a critical response to the growing electoral influence of large donors, often cloaked in anonymity. Advocates at the Brennan Center for Justice and good government group Citizens Union testified in favor of Brooks-Powers' bill at a hearing in December. No one testified against.

“New York City voters deserve to know when someone is spending big money to sway the outcome of ballot contests that affect their daily lives," wrote Marina Pino, a lawyer at the Brennan Center, in an email to Gotham Gazette. "Across the country, wealthy individuals and groups spend huge sums to push their interests and influence voters in these critical contests. This bill takes an important step forward in closing gaps in disclosure laws that shield secret spending, while still capturing only the largest spenders seeking to sway voters.”

"Similar disclosure rules in elections for city offices have helped voters learn who is funding campaigns and mitigated the impact of 'dark money' in our city," wrote Ben Weinberg, Citizens Union's policy director, in an email. "Extending these rules to apply to local referenda campaigns is a reasonable response to the increase in Super PAC spending in New York."

The bill was first sponsored by Comptroller Brad Lander, then a City Council member from Brooklyn, after uncharacteristic spending on referendums in the 2019 elections sparked renewed interest.

That year the CFB recommended city lawmakers close the charter loophole after three independent expenditure committees spent roughly $1.15 million in support or opposition to proposed Charter amendments, most of it from a single group in support of adopting a ranked-choice voting system (the group, the Committee for Ranked Choice Voting NYC, included Citizens Union executive director Betsy Gotbaum as a board member). Ballot proposals the year before, in 2018, saw about $125,000 in independent spending. While the individuals controlling the committees had to be reported, the donors bankrolling them did not.

There are no independent expenditures reported on the Campaign Finance Board's online portal on ballot referendums in the 2022 election, which included three amendments proposed by the city's Racial Justice Commission. New York City voters approved every municipal ballot question in 2018, 2019, and 2022 by wide margins.

"[W]hen it comes to ballot proposals, our law has a blind spot. Bringing the disclosure for ballot proposals in line with the requirements for independent expenditures about candidates will provide voters with important information that will help them cast informed votes, and we urge the Council to take action,” said Amy Loprest, then-executive director of the CFB, in a 2019 statement urging the Council to pass the Charter amendment to require disclosure around spending for or against ballot questions.

“Disclosing donors of independent expenditures for ballot initiatives would be a win for election transparency and our democracy," Lander said in a statement provided by a spokesperson this week. Lander was also the sponsor of the amendment that created the disclosure requirements for outside spending on candidate campaigns in 2014.

"The public deserves to know who is paying for the ads about ballot proposals that could become law as we head into another municipal election cycle this year," he said.

The bill is scheduled to be voted on the City Council's Government Operations Committee on Thursday and is expected to go to the full Council later that day where it is set to pass. If signed by the mayor or allowed to age into law, the law will take effect on January 1, 2024. The mayor’s office did not provide comment for this article about his stance on the bill.

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by Ethan Geringer-Sameth, reporter, Gotham Gazette
     

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Note: Gotham Gazette is an independent publication of Citizens Union Foundation, sister organization of Citizens Union.

'Critical to the Future': City Council Considers Two Board of Correction Nominees


Mayor Adams on Rikers Island (photo: Michael Appleton/Mayor's Office)


The New York City Board of Correction, a nine-seat panel with oversight over city jails, may soon have two new members including a former Rikers Island doctor critical of mass incarceration and a national expert on corrections policy who now leads the advocacy group that successfully advocated for the planned closure of the Rikers jail complex.

The City Council’s Committee on Rules, Privileges and Elections on Wednesday held a hearing to question two of its own Board of Correction nominees – Dr. Rachael Bedard, former senior director of the Geriatrics and Complex Care Service at Correctional Health Services, a division of New York Health+Hospitals running health care in city jails; and DeAnna Hoskins, president and CEO of JustLeadershipUSA, which led the Close Rikers Campaign.

Bedard and Hoskins are outspoken proponents of the city’s plan to shutter the violence-plagued Rikers Island jail complex and replace it with four borough-based jails, as well as the Council’s push to end solitary confinement policies (legislation is pending to do so). While that makes them ideal candidates for a Council where a majority of members support both steps, it puts them at some odds with Mayor Eric Adams, who has repeatedly called into question the Rikers closure plan as well as defended the use of a form of solitary confinement, punitive segregation, as a necessary tool for jail safety.

The Board of Correction is an oversight body that monitors and investigates the city’s correctional facilities, creates policies that must be implemented by the Department of Correction, evaluates the performance of Department of Correction employees, and redresses the grievances of staff and detainees. Three of its members are appointed by the City Council, three are appointed directly by the mayor, who also chooses the chair, and the other three are appointed by the mayor on the joint nomination of the presiding judges of the appellate division of the Supreme Court for the first and second judicial departments.

Nominees are confirmed by the City Council, first by the rules committee then the full Council. Members of the Board of Correction serve six-year terms.

At Wednesday’s hearing, Council members pressed Bedard and Hoskins on their experience and qualifications, the Rikers closure plan, the importance of borough-based detention facilities and solitary confinement and punitive segregation.

“These appointments are really critical to the future…[to] make sure that our correctional system is functioning, that we address outstanding issues in it and that the folks that are in our custody get the attention that they often need and deserve,” said City Council Member Keith Powers, a Democrat who is the Council majority leader and also chairs the rules committee. Last term, Powers oversaw city jails as chair of the Council’s Committee on Criminal Justice.

Hoskins, who was once incarcerated herself, has previously served on the city’s task force to eliminate solitary confinement, helped develop corrections and reentry policies for the Obama administration, and worked with 20 state facilities and 80 local jails during her career. “I bring a pragmatic advocacy to this board, and I understand how the system works on the inside and how to move the needle on policy matters,” she said in her opening statement, citing her own experience with the justice system.

Bedard, who is an internist, geriatrician, and palliative care physician, works as a research fellow at the Institute to End Mass Incarceration at Harvard Law School and worked at the city’s Correctional Health Services from 2016 to 2022. She has been an outspoken critic of the failed policies at Rikers and the overall corrections system.

As Bedard noted in her opening statement, she worked at Rikers during the time that the closure movement gained momentum and the jail’s population fell significantly, and also during the height of the pandemic when the jail complex was in a state of crisis. She pointed out that deaths of people in custody in the Rikers Island complex went from 3 in 2019, the lowest ever, to 19 in 2022, the highest level in 25 years.

“I believe that the Board of Correction is more important now than any time in recent memory,” she said. “No other civilian body has unfettered access to visit the jails to talk to the people who live and work there, to request and analyze jail data, and to make recommendations for change.”

The City Council and Mayor Bill de Blasio passed a law that requires the Rikers jail complex to close by 2027. But it is contingent on reducing the average daily jail population below 3,300 detainees, who would be housed in four new borough facilities that are in various stages of design and construction. But the Adams administration has expressed doubts about hitting that target, with Mayor Adams saying there should have been a “Plan B” and that he has assembled a small task force to create one. There are currently more than 5,700 people in city jails and, according to City & State, Department of Correction Commissioner Louis Molina told the Council at a December hearing that the number could increase beyond 7,000 by 2024.

At Wednesday’s hearing, Hoskins and Bedard stressed the importance of the borough-based jails plan. “Borough-based facilities are a necessity if we want to keep people close [to their families], reduce the city’s cost of transporting [detainees], running the court system,” Hoskins said, “but also empowering and encouraging our staff that this is not just about monitoring and babysitting individuals who are incarcerated. This is actively being involved in your community.”

Bedard expressed concern that the mayor “has pretty explicitly said that he no longer feels beholden” to meeting the target of reducing the jail population. “If we go forward with that, what we end up with is new facilities in the boroughs with either overcrowding or folks you have to put in other places, either keeping the island open or using state facilities or what have you,” she said.

Asked by City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams if they supported creating gender-specific facilities for the safety of women, both nominees issued a word of caution. “I also believe we have to have gender-specific programs, access, and housing but does that require creating one facility for the women that may defeat the initial purpose of keeping women close to their families, when their caregivers and other people may be taking care of their children?,” Hoskins said.

“I would reiterate that I think gender-specific housing or gender-specific units at a minimum are important in maintaining safety for incarcerated women, incarcerated folks who are transgender or nonbinary,” Bedard said. “And at the same time, especially given that so many of the women incarcerated on Rikers Island are parents, it feels imperative to try to colocate those folks as close to their family as we can.”

Both nominees spoke out against punitive segregation, which the Council and Public Advocate Jumaane Williams are trying to ban through legislation. The bill has the support of Speaker Adams and was considered at a Council hearing in September. That same month, the mayor harshly criticized the proposal.

“If someone slashes someone with a knife on the street, I put him in jail. I remove him from population because he’s dangerous,” the mayor said, at an unrelated press conference in Washington, D.C., when he was asked if he’d sign the bill. “Someone slashes someone in jail, what do I do with him? I remove him from population and put him someplace by himself until he corrects his action and gets the assistance he needs. So what the City Council is saying is if someone slashes someone in jail, you do nothing with them.” (That is not what the bill says, it allows for separation from others in such a situation, but requires evaluations and actions on a short timeline.)

Hoskins and Bedard also promised to work on reforms to management that will ensure safety of correction staff and officers as well — violence at Rikers between detainees and between detainees and guards has skyrocketed in recent years. Hoskins suggested improvements to jail infrastructure as one solution, which is part of the plan for the design of the new jails. There have also been major safety issues because of correction officer absences, in part due to abuse of sick leave.

Bedard argued for reducing interactions between detainees and officers. “If you create circumstances where you demonstrate some trust in the detainees by allowing them more independence in a safe way for their own day, you decrease the number of contacts that they need to have with officers and if you do that, you just decrease the number of opportunities for tension and conflict,” said Bedard.

Though Rikers is already under the purview of a federal monitor because of a consent decree stemming from a 2011 lawsuit, several elected officials and advocates have pushed a federal judge to appoint a receiver who would take over the Department of Correction and the operation of city jails amid the current crisis. In November, the judge in the case, Laura Taylor Swain, chief judge for the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, gave the DOC more time to implement reforms, ordering all sides back to court in April for another review.

Council members did not pose any questions about the possible receivership to Hoskins and Bedard.

If appointed, Hoskins will serve a six-year term while Bedard will serve the remainder of a term that ends October 12, 2026. There are currently three vacancies on the Board of Correction – Hoskins and Bedard would fill two of them. Mayor Adams has appointed two members of his choice, including the chair, Dwayne Sampson, to the board and a third based on a judicial nomination.

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by Samar Khurshid, senior reporter, Gotham Gazette
     

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