The campaigns for presidential nominations have been close this year, but for many New York State voters, the hardest thing about elections isn't in keeping up with the latest political gossip or even deciding between the candidates. Rather, just casting a ballot can be the most difficult part of voting for some of the three million disabled citizens in New York State.
The passage of the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) should have been a triumph for these New Yorkers. Passed in 2002, it mandated that every poll site have at least one accessible voting machine, and that every poll site be handicapped-accessible by January 1, 2006. Yet, slow progress of New York State's implementation of the law and selection of new voting machines has delayed the advances HAVA offered disabled voters. This fall's primary and general elections will mark the first time in the state that disabled voters will be able to vote privately and independently, without the help of a friend or poll worker.
The first lever machine was used in New York state in 1892, but they do not accommodate handicapped voters and are thus considered not to comply with federal law HAVA. In place of the levers, the counties of New York must now choose between optical scanning machines-and their ballot marking device (BMD) companions-and direct recording electronic (DRE) machines.
Optical scan voting systems count and tabulate the vote from paper ballots marked by the voter. DRE machines operate using a touch screen that allows the voter to make their selections, much like an ATM.
Under HAVA, New York was required to provide at least one accessible voting machine in each poll site by 2006. The State Board of Elections has yet to complete the process of certifying voting machines, needed in order for county offices to purchase and implement the new voting systems across the state. As a result of this inaction the U.S. Department of Justice sued the state in 2006 for non-compliance and ordered it to institute an interim plan to avoid disenfranchising handicapped voters while testing and certification of new voting machines was completed. The interim plan, in place since 2006, allowed for one location in each borough to be equipped with BMDs on election days.
In November 2007, the U.S. District Court overseeing the ongoing lawsuit required the State Board of Elections to come up with a revised plan for implementing HAVA. Gridlocked and unable to agree, Republican and the Democrat commissioners submitted separate proposals. Both parties called for one BMD to be placed in each poll site by September 2008, while voters not requiring the devices would continue to use the lever machines. The Democrats, though, called for implementation of a completely new voting system by 2009, as the Republicans set no timetable for full implementation of the new system.
The court order gave the elections board one last chance to reach an agreement and move forward toward replacing the state's old lever voting machines. In early January, the board submitted a plan to place one BMD at each poll site by this September and completely replace the lever machines by 2009.
On January 23, the State Board of Elections released a list of approved ballot marking devices from which each county must select the ones it purchases. Three ballot marking devices were approved: the Sequoia Image Cast, ES&S Automark and Premier Automark - all of which used paper ballots, and would be read by optical scanners or counted by hand. The two Automarks were approved on the condition of required adjustments.
Two weeks later the board rescinded its approval of the two Automark systems in a split vote. By that time Liberty, the vendor that proposed the use of its DRE machine as possible option for a ballot-marking device, had already sued the Board of Elections for not including them in the initial list.
This month, a judge ordered that the Liberty DRE machine be included in the board's initial list of approved ballot marking devices. Not long after, ES&S and Premier were also ordered back on the list just in time for counties to make their selections of BMDs on February 8.
New York City voted 5 to 4 to purchase the ES&S Automark. Queens commissioner Anthony Como broke ranks and voted for the ES&S machine, while the other four commissioners voted for the Sequoia Image Cast.
Around the state an overwhelming majority of counties opted to purchase the Sequoia Image Cast. The machine has yet to be used in the United States. Three other counties-Albany, Schenectady and Rockland-will go with the Premier Automark. Hamilton County was the only one in the state that selected to purchase the Liberty DRE.
Ballot marking devices (BMD) are used to allow disabled voters to mark paper ballots independently and privately. BMDs do not count votes. They simply mark a voter's ballot, which is then transported through a "privacy sleeve" to the poll site's scanner or box. This year poll sites will deliver those ballots to their borough office to be counted along with other paper ballots such as, absentee, emergency ballots, affidavit ballots and military ballots.
To use a BMD a voter can listen to the options through an audio recording with headphones, or view the options on a touch-screen, which somewhat resembles an ATM screen. There are a number of different ways to for voters to make their selections, and the BMD is designed to accommodate variety of disabilities. For example, voters with visual impairments can use features that allow the contests on the screen to be enlarged or view using a two-tone display. Headphones can also be plugged into the device, and voters can listen to the ballot choices, making their selections using a Braille keypad. Voters with limited mobility can identify their selection using a sip and puff device, rocker paddles.
Those viewing the options on the screen can make their selections using any of devices mentioned above or can use the touch-screen itself. The machine can also accommodate voters with limited English proficiency. It can display ballot races in the languages required in some jurisdictions by federal law, which include Chinese, Korean, and Spanish in parts of New York City. Audio recordings of the ballot in these languages can also be recorded to allow visually impaired voters the opportunity to vote in the language of their choice. At the end of the process, the voter can review his ballot aurally, through an audio device, or visually, by printing out the ballot.
This year, disabled voters will be able to use the devices in their own polling sites for the first time. All other voters will cast their ballots on the lever voting machines, which will still be employed in 2008.
If the BMDs are used next year in conjunction with an optical scan voting system throughout the city, disabled voters who are not disabled will mark their ballots by hand. However, there are no limitations to who will be allowed to use the ballot marking devices. Some disability advocates are, in fact, encouraging the use of the machines by all voters, as a way to avoid segregating disabled voters and stigmatizing use of the machines. Others fear, however, that unnecessary use of the machines might create long lines for disabled voters.
Although ballot-marking devices are a huge advance toward enfranchising disabled voters, purchasing the machines is only the first step. Voter and poll worker education is also imperative as New York City makes the transition to a new way of voting. Poll workers will be required become intimately understand ballot marking devices and long term solution voting machines over the next two years, and their ability to operate and demonstrate new voting technologies will be crucial. Furthermore, all voters will also need to be adequately prepared for what these changes will mean for them as they enter their poll sites this fall and next year.
"The State Board of Elections needs to have information about BMDs available in an accessible format. There needs to be materials available in large print and Braille," said Aaron Belisle, voter education and access coordinator at the Center for Independence of the Disabled, NY. For now, though, he notes, that the PDF format the city Board of Elections Web site uses is not compatible with screen-reading software. By getting information out to voters about the new ballot marking devices and their proper usage, the City BOE can work to prevent confusion at the polls amongst disabled and non-disabled voters alike.
Andrea Senteno is program associate for Citizens Union Foundation, which publishes Gotham Gazette. Lenore Costello is an intern at Gotham Gazette.
In the first month of the New Year, 23 bills were introduced at the City Council. From the regulation of sex offenders to the study of vacant properties, here is a sampling of the legislation members of the City Council will be pushing for this year.
Sparked by a survey by Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer, several bills were introduced at the City Council that regulate vacant buildings.
Councilmember David Yassky is calling for the mandatory registration of vacant buildings, which will detail whether a property is intended for a particular use or demolition. The bill (Intro 693) would also include a $1,000 registration fee. Another bill (Intro 694), also introduced by Yassky, calls for an annual survey of all vacant buildings. Some officials have said if they city tallied all of its vacant buildings it could better capitalize on this wasted resource.
Councilmember Melissa Mark Viverito introduced legislation (Intro 687) last month that mandates all vacant buildings be inspected every five years. A bill offered by Councilmember Alan Gerson (Intro 681) would require the city’s Department of Administrative Services to conduct an inventory of all city-owned properties. For vacant properties, the department must submit an annual report detailing the location and best use for such property.
Between 1986 and 1995, nearly 50 percent of the sex offenders released from prison returned for violating their parole, according to a report from the state Department of Correctional Services.
Based on that, Councilmember Joseph Addabbo introduced legislation (Intro 672) banning any level-three sex offender -- those considered at a “high level of risk” for a repeat offense -- from living within 1,000 feet of a park or school. Under the legislation, a violator would be subject to six months in prison or a fine of no more than $500.
Councilmember Jessica Lappin is calling for the introduction of a recycling program in public parks. Under legislation (Intro 673) introduced in January, at least 30 parks would start the pilot program in May and collect recyclable materials, including glass, paper and plastic, and monitor the contents. The program must be spread throughout the five boroughs.
Legislation introduced by Councilmember Joseph Addabbo would prohibit the sale of materials made of glass or glass packaging within 150 feet of a city beach. Under the bill, (Intro 677) a violator would be subject to a fine from between $100 and $500.
Councilmember Letitia James introduced a bill that would require several city departments address racial and ethnic segregation in the city. Among its provisions, the bill (Intro 685) would require the Department of City Planning to analyze the impact of zoning changes on residential racial segregation 30 days prior to any public hearing.
A bill ( Intro 690) introduced by Councilmember Darlene Mealy would require the Department of Education to distribute voter registration cards to all students within 30 days of their 18th birthday.
Under current city law, those infected with HIV are eligible for city benefits and services only if they exhibit symptoms. Legislation (Intro 691) introduced by Councilmember Annabel Palma, would expand that definition to anyone who is HIV positive.
Legislation (Intro 692) introduced by Councilmember James Vacca would require all candidates for employment at the Department of Aging to be fingerprinted in order to determine whether they have a criminal background. The bill also would apply to any employee of an agency that has a contract with the department. Â
During the 2004 presidential campaign, both major party candidates seemed to have just one concern about U.S. cities: protecting them from terrorism. The lofty plans for an urban agenda from the 1960s and 1970s had vanished. Even former Gov. Mario Cuomo's 1980s references to "A Tale of Two Cities" had gone.
Now it's 2008 with a new campaign, new candidate, new issues. Will this year's contenders put more focus on cities or will urban issues once again get lost in the onslaught of other issues -- Iraq, Iran, the plummeting economy -- to say nothing of poll numbers, spin and media buys?
Some advocates have sought to put city concerns in the spotlight this year. Several candidates, including a few who have survived to this point, have strong ties to U.S. cities. With 10 more months remaining in this already seemingly endless campaign, much could change before people actually vote.
For now, though, it seems that urban issues -- while arguably less neglected than they were four years ago -- still have a long way to go to be as prominent as they were in the political discourse of the 1960s and 1970s. Demographic shifts, election schedules, voting patterns and ideological consideration have all pushed the urban agenda to the back of the national agenda.
In the 1960s, as riots gripped many urban areas, top politicians saw a role for the federal government in fixing the problems.
"In the next 40 years we must rebuild the entire urban United States," President Lyndon Johnson said in a speech at the University of Michigan in 1964. "Our society will never be great until our cities are great."
Two years later, Congress passed Johnson's Model Cities program, an ambitious plan to coordinate existing urban programs, rebuild and rehabilitate parts of the cities, deliver social services and foster citizen participation. By the mid-1970s, it was dead -- a victim of pork barrel politics, disputes within in cities over who should control what, concern about spending and a raft of seemingly intractable economic and social woes.
While he sought to end the Great Society's urban programs, Richard Nixon, Johnson's successor, still paid some attention to cities. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, later to be the U.S. senator from New York, served as a White House counselor, outlining in 1970 a cohesive statement of urban policies, according to a glowing account in Time magazine. Among other things, Moynihan's program said, "The poverty and social isolation of minority groups in central cities is the single most serious problem of the American city today, and we must attack the urgent problem with a greater commitment of resources.''
Rather than rely on Model Cities, Nixon shifted money into revenue sharing, which some critics said weakened the federal effort. But, say what one would about Nixon, the worst for federal urban programs -- and their role in the national debate -- was yet to come.
In 1974, Nixon's successor Gerald Ford, would, as the Daily News so famously put it, tell New York to drop dead (relenting under pressure from the leaders of France and Germany, according to Felix Rohaytn who played a key role in engineering a rescue plan for the city). President Jimmy Carter appointed an august blue-ribbon panel to consider the nation's agenda, including the urban agenda, for the 1980s. It concluded that American's older cities had essentially outlived their usefulness. According to a synopsis that then appeared in Time magazine, the group dismissed efforts to reindustrialize central cities as self-defeating and derided efforts to sustain those cities. Aid instead should go directly to the poor, with government encouraging the "historical role of migration as the dominant means of linking people to opportunity." After all, the report said, "Contrary to popular wisdom, cities are not permanent."
Although the "Agenda for the Eighties," like so many similar documents, has been consigned to the dustbin of history, its recommendations -- at least the ones about neglecting the city, if not those about helping the poor -- seemed to live on in the decades that followed. Ronald Reagan famously disbanded many federal programs aimed at cities, even cutting efforts to eradicate rats.
"Hardly anyone wants to talk about cities these days," Norman Glickman an urban policy professor at the University of Texas wrote in 1987. "President Reagan has largely ignored them. He's cut budgets for urban services and housing. He's talked half-heartedly about 'free market' solutions like enterprise zones and housing vouchers, but he hasn't committed much political capital to either."
While Bill Clinton had widespread support in many American cities, he did not talk much about them. As an astute political observer, he instead "tailored his political rhetoric and policy initiatives to appeal mainly to middle-class resident of suburbia," wrote Charles Euchner and Stephen McGovern in "Urban Policy Reconsidered."
Like it or not, Bill Clinton had a point. Cities account for a much smaller percentage of the population than they did as recently as the 1960s. In 1960, the U.S. population was evenly divided among central cities, suburbs, and rural areas. Today, less than a third of Americans live in urban areas. And 40 years ago, New York City was home to about 4.3 percent of the U.S. population. By the beginning of the 21st century, that had dropped 2.7 percent.
Many of the people who live in cities vote reliably Democratic -- often by overwhelming margins -- giving neither party much incentive to curry favor with their residents.
But Euchner and McGovern go beyond that. They believe there is a widespread sense in the country that the federal government cannot solve urban problems and that some Americans don't care. For many "who have erected all kinds of walls, figuratively and literally, around their suburban and exurban enclaves" the problems of the city remain out of sight and out of mind, the writers say.
Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown put it another way. "If you look at the riots that took place in the '60s and the flight from our cities since that time, urban issues have definitely become synonymous with poverty, with minorities," he has said. "That has negatively shaped how urban issues are discussed, debated and looked at."
Meanwhile, despite Washington's neglect some cities, including New York, have thrived. Their revival, which began in the 1990s and has continued largely until today, did not come from federal programs. Instead, some experts attribute it to declining crime rates and lower taxes.
Many mayors and others still see a need for a focus on cities. While cities have done much on their own, Neal Pearce writes, they need recognition and an assist from the presidential candidates on matters such as immigration, crime, illegal drugs, housing and infrastructure.
"Down here where the rubber meets the road, we're fixing potholes, we're making cities safer, we're solving problems around health care," Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper told Pearce. "We can figure out the solutions. We're America's laboratories." But cities, he adds, need Washington's help to "roll out" the new solutions "to the whole community and the whole country."
The National League of Cities recently urged President George Bush to focus more on cities in light of the nation's economic slowdown. The group, which includes many of America's mayors, called on the federal government to address such problems as aging infrastructure and crime, "develop innovative energy and the environmental programs" and help find solutions to housing crisis. " As the nation's cities and town struggle to address the influx of immigrants in their communities," the group urged Washington to "refocus" on immigration reform.
To spur a discussion of urban issues, Mayor TV, a project of the progressive policy group, the Drum Major Institute, and The Nation magazine interviewed a number of mayors about what they thought. In the interviews the mayors underscored that the presidential candidates largely ignore matters they confront every day.
"The federal government has been almost absent in addressing the issues of our cities, whether it's the issue of poverty, or work and opportunity, or bolstering the middle class and working families," Mayor Anthony Villaraigosa of Los Angeles said. "We have wars here in our city with drugs. It's a huge war. It hasn't gone away," said another of the mayors, Baltimore's Sheila Dixon.
So will these issues get any attention this time around?
A number of the candidates have ties to large cities. Hillary Clinton is a senator from New York, Senator Barack Obama has lived in both New York and Chicago and worked as a community organizer in Chicago. Mitt Romney's father, George, served as a secretary of housing and urban development, and during his time as governor of Massachusetts, Mitt Romney took several initiatives aimed at housing and transportation in Boston. And then there are the two New York City mayors. During his ill-fated campaign Rudolph Giuliani often trumpeted what he viewed as his success in righting a metropolis that had gone disastrously wrong. And Michael Bloomberg hovers in the wings pondering a presidential bid that, one thinks, would have to discuss cities in some way.
Then too, domestic issues seem back at center stage. After the 2004 election, with national security and the war in Iraq capturing most attention, Americans has now focused again on the economy, housing, health care, environment and energy -- all of which play out in a major way in American cities.
The focus on issues such as building a middle class, while not explicitly an urban agenda, addresses urban concern. Mayor Manny Diaz of Miami hailed this development, saying he was glad candidate were finally debating such topics.
Despite this, many think the cities still get short shrift.
"In mid-October, I noted that the Democrats and Republicans had held 17 or so presidential debates..., but that with all the gabbing they managed not to focus on America's cities," Clyde Haberman of the New York Times wrote in December. "Well, two months have passed, and that observation is no longer valid. The candidates have now held 25 or so debates without talking about urban issues."
"Each presidential candidate has talked about issues that are important to cities, such as health care and jobs. But none has set forth a comprehensive revival program," the Detriot Free Press said in an editorial.
The remaining candidates do not have explicit urban agendas, although several have rural agendas. They do, though, have stands on issues Gotham Gazette views as having particular relevance to our cities. Click here for the table showing where the remaining major Democratic candidates stand and here for the table showing the four remaining major Republican candidates and where they stand on issues from gun control to infrastructure.
A quick look at the table will show many similarities between the tables and many differences between them. As has been often noted, for example, the two Democrats, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, agree that a federal program should provide health coverage to all Americans who need it (though they differ on whether that coverage should be required for all adults). None of the Republicans endorses federally sponsored universal health care, as they look instead to an array of measures to bring down costs and make coverage more available.
The Republicans all stress school choice -- including allowing parents to home school their children. Clinton and Obama both emphasize more early childhood education and better training and support for teachers. The two Democrats support gun control measures; the Republicans largely oppose them. And so on.
In general, reflecting perhaps the reality that most urban voters are Democratic voters along with an ideology that looks more to government solutions, the Democrats call for more actions and programs from Washington that would benefit cities and Republicans barely mention them . Both Clinton and Obama, for example, had representatives at a recent forum on infrastructure and transportation issues sponsored by the Rudin Center. None of the Republicans sent anyone, although center director Allison deCerreno said John McCain did try to. The others, she implied, did not even try.
Writing in the Boston Globe earlier this month, Harvard economic professor Edward Glaeser decried the Republican attitude. The Republican line on key issues, he said,"does not favor cities. While a right to riflery may make sense in rural Iowa, an abundance of guns only harms our inner cities. While residents of small town America may dislike immigrants, immigrants are the lifeblood of dynamic urban areas."
Not that Glaeser finds much to like in the Democrats either: "Republicans now ignore cities altogether, and Democratic urban policies cater too much to well-organized urban interests."
For years, political columnists and television talk show comedians have mocked politicians of both parties for their shameless pandering to the "good people" of Iowa and New Hampshire. In 1980s, Saturday Night Live featured a skit where actors portraying various politicians of the day occupy the home of an average Iowa so they can do the dishes, run errands -- and get the family's votes.
The revised primary calendar in effect this year seeks to give urban states, including New York, a bigger -- and earlier role -- in the process. Does that mean aiding the subway will soon become the political equivalent of backing ethanol. That the fields of Central Park will supplant snowy New England town squares?
Tune in in 2012.
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