ALBANY, N.Y. – State lawmakers are considering an overhaul of voter registration and a redesign of ballots to include only two languages other than English as officials look to modernize and streamline elections ahead of state and national races.
A number of the laws being proposed in the state Legislature could be long-shots with only two weeks left in the legislative session, while others may be days away from being passed.
Ballots are likely to be redesigned to contain only two languages other than English and feature bigger type, clearer presentation of candidate’s names and better distinction of where voters should notate their choice of candidate.
"Clearly the biggest complaint about the voting process since the introduction of optical scan ballots has been about the difficulty of reading the ballot,” said Neal Rosenstein of the New York Public Interest Research Group. “The problem is the font size, poor design, unwieldy instructions and unnecessary clutter. We hope this will address the font size. We think this is great news for what will be an extraordinarily complex and crammed ballot full of different offices and candidates.”
The legislation, which is expected to pass by the end of the session, is being negotiated by the Cuomo administration and both legislative majorities.
State Assemblyman Brian Kavanagh is sponsoring several measures that would massively remake voter registration in the state. Last week, Kavanagh and Sen. Mike Gianaris, both Democrats introduced The Voter Empowerment Act – a bill full of changes to the voting registration process that is so comprehensive that it seems unlikely to move this session, if at all.
The Voter Empowerment Act would automatically register consenting adults, allow preregistration of teens aged 16 and 17, and update voter registration when people interact with certain government agencies and when they move. Currently, citizens most obtain forms and mail them in to register or register in person. The new legislation would allow online registration and make changes to addresses and party affiliation easier. Right now, voters who change their parties before an election are not officially registered in the party until the Tuesday following the election.
A recent George Mason University study found that New York ranks at the bottom of a list of states in voter turnout with only 35 percent choosing to cast ballots in the 2010 election. A recent report from the Center for American Progress showed that New York has over 500,000 eligible but unregistered Latino voters, and a million more who will be eligible when they naturalize.
Gianaris said the current system puts the burden on the citizen to register. “We have a 19th century system in 21st century world," he said.
Rosenstein agrees. He said a number of states including California, Arizona and Pennsylvania have online registration. “New York is clawing its way out of the industrial age on voter registration," he said. "Other states have shown that auto registration increases registration and makes the process more efficient.”
Rosenstein said most Western Democracies don’t have voter registration. They simply have checks to prevent fraud at the polls. “There is no reason in this day and age to preserve this archaic system,” he said.
Gianaris’ support of the bill has some Republican Senators opposed to it on principal, since Gianaris is the head of the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee.
Scott Reif, a spokesman for the Senate Majority, declined to comment on the bill except to say it wasn’t “a priority.”
But Gianaris does not see the issue as partisan.
“Really the problem is incumbents vs. challengers. The battle lines are not partisan when it comes to reform," he said. "I think you will find a number of incumbent Democrats who are against changing the way people are elected. In a progressive state like New York we should not be third from the bottom in voter participation.”
Kavanagh said incumbents "have issues with this because they were elected under the current rules."
"Incumbents hear from voters all the time about how hard it is to register, to stay on the roles and to vote," he continued. But he said he planned to make sure the issue was nonpartisan.
“We are going to reach across the aisle. It's not like we are forcing everyone to register. There would be a box to check to opt out. But I think most officials think that if everyone was registered that their party would win because their ideas are better," he said.
Another bill being sponsored by Kavanagh would change how votes are tallied and reported on election night before the vote is certified. Currently, the process involves time-consuming hand counts of votes by election district.
The New York City Council passed a resolution yesterday in support of the bill, which would have a major impact on elections in the city of 8 million people.
"The procedure for reporting unofficial election night results, with all its delay and inaccuracy, is undermining everyone's confidence in our ability to run fair, efficient elections," Kavanagh said in a statement read to the Council’s committee on governmental operations, which considered the resolution earlier this week.
Art Chang, chair of the New York City Campaign Finance Board's voter assistance advisory committee, explained that all the old steps are unnecessary with the use of electronic voting machines.
"There is no logical reason we should be using scissors, paper and pencils to compile and transmit a tally of votes that have been collected by electronic devices," Chang said. "We've made a massive investment into technology to improve the way we cast our votes. We somehow neglected to improve the way we count our votes."
The bill would allow the city Board of Elections to report results more quickly, with a portable memory device holding ballot scanner data replacing cut-and-pasted paper tapes. This practice has already been applied successfully in some New York counties, including Nassau County, according to Kavanagh. However, the Board of Elections in the City of New York has yet to give their support for this resolution.
Gale Brewer, chair of the Committee on Governmental Operations, said she expected a response from them by Tuesday.
Adrienne Kivelson, who represented the League of Women Voters as a witness at the hearing, explained that her organization also could not directly support Kavanagh's bill.
"As much as we recognize the urgency to address this issue… we find nothing in the bill that's going to speed up the process for poll workers who've already put in a 15-hour day," she said.
Kivelson emphasized the bill's flexibility as a weak point, saying that her organization wanted a more forceful change in canvassing methodology.
"The bill is very permissive and 'may' is used very often in the bill," Kivelson said. "That doesn't give us great confidence in the procedure changing."
She added: "We view 'may' rather than 'shall' in the language of the bill as unacceptable."
However, the consensus among all who spoke was that some sort of change should happen as soon as possible, considering upcoming local and national elections in the city.
"The perfect storm can result from this coming election day, in a nationally high-profile, hotly-contested election, where high turnout and long lines overwhelm election workers," explained Leonard Kohen, secretary of the New York Democratic Lawyers Council.
Brewer said she had personal experience with the complexity of the process. "There's no question that we're all trying to achieve the same goal, which is to have a streamlined but always accurate, always secure process," she said.
With the state Legislature’s session coming to a close on June 21 and legislators focused on their own election battles, much of Kavanagh’s legislation could be left undone.
Both Gianaris and Kavanagh acknowledged that a result was not imminent, but that they wanted to start a conversation.
And then, of course, in true Albany fashion, both legislators say they expect to be called back to session – perhaps after the November elections to address outstanding issues and legislative deals.
“It is too late in the year to make changes for this election season,” Gianaris said of the voter registration reform legislation. "I expect we will back and we plan to talk about this legislation next year but we have taken the first big step.”
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Nina Goldman contributed to this report.
A federal judge granted class-action status to a lawsuit alleging the New York Police Department unlawfully targeted blacks and Hispanics with its stop-and-frisk crime reduction program.
U.S. District Judge Shira A. Scheindlin wrote in the decision filed today that the city had demonstrated “a deeply troubling apathy towards New Yorkers’ most fundamental constitutional rights.”
The city’s Law Department said it disagreed with the judge’s decision and was reviewing its legal options.
Police released data Friday showing an increase in the number of stops on city streets between January and March of this year. The data showed there were 203,500 street stops, compared to183,326 in 2011.
Scheindlin wrote that over 2.8 million stops were made between 2004 and 2009.
At a forum held to discuss alternatives to stop-and-frisk moderated by Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer in Harlem later in the evening, the ethnically mixed crowd broke into applause when news of the judge’s decision was announced.
The group of about 150 people had gathered at a Touro College lecture hall to listen to a panel of experts. Many were activists, some wearing “STOP STOP-AND-FRISK” buttons.
Myrtho Gardiner, a member of the Association for Black Social Workers, said he was glad to hear about the judge’s decision.
“My concern is that the courts take too long,” said the 31-year-old, who claimed he had been stopped and frisked by police in Harlem. “The practice needs to end now.”
Sharita Pair, 21 and Samantha Waddell, 18, both with YouthBuild USA, didn’t want to see stop-and-frisk end completely.
“I see guys just walking around with guns,” Pair said. “But it should be cut down.”
Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly has strongly defended the practice and, during a City Council hearing last month, pugnaciously argued that the policy had successfully reduced violence among young men of color.
The lawsuit that was granted class-action status earlier today was filed by four black men who allege their Fourth and Fourteenth Amendment rights were violated. They also claim they represent a disproportionate number of blacks and Latinos stopped by officers under the NYPD's strategy. In addition, they have called for an injunction against the policy, the court papers said.
Scheindlin wrote that, if the NYPD is "engaging in a widespread practice of unlawful stops," then an injunction would be a "vindication of the Constitution and an exercise of the courts' most important function: protecting individual rights in the face of the government's malfeasance."
Richard Aborn, executive director of the Citizens Crime Commission of New York City, said the case demonstrates the need for independent and transparent oversight of the NYPD. "It is the only large department in the United States without independent oversight," he said.
The NYPD's stop-and-frisk policy was previously litigated in a case resolved in 2003, with the city agreeing in a settlement to procedures aimed at reducing racial disparities in the numbers of people stopped by officers. The police department adopted a racial profiling policy, revamped how it documents stops and made other changes.
The current lawsuit was brought in 2008 after the settlement expired, according to the court papers.
Next Tuesday Marlen Fernandez and a handful of other undocumented students will arrive in Albany to petition state legislators to pass the New York State DREAM Act. The students from the New York State Youth Leadership Council, an advocacy group made up of undocumented youth like Fernandez, will have walked 150 miles from New York City over eight days to deliver their message in the state capital.
Fernandez, 19, is a sophomore at Lehman College studying to be a medical anthropologist. Like many undocumented youth, Fernandez was brought to this country by her parents when she was a small child. But her undocumented status prevents her from receiving state financial aid to pay for her education, so she has to work two jobs, as a cashier and hostess, while she’s in school to pay her tuition.
“I’m always working to save up for next semester. My parents try to help out but they can’t pay for my school and support a family of five,” Fernandez says. Her parents also both work two jobs.
The New York State DREAM Act would allow eligible undocumented students like Fernandez to receive state financial aid for their education through the state’s Tuition Assistance Program (TAP). Estimates vary but the New York State Youth Leadership Council says that at least 4,000 students in state and city public colleges would become eligible for state financial aid. Many more students at private institutions and who don’t attend school because they can’t afford it would also become eligible, the group says.
The Fiscal Policy Institute, an independent economic think-tank that supports the DREAM Act, issued a report stating that the bill would cost the TAP program an extra $17 million. By those numbers, the report says, a taxpayer earning between $60,000 and $75,000 a year would pay $1.34 more in state taxes each year to cover the DREAM Act.
The bill’s supporters say that the cost is well worth the investment, since a college diploma would dramatically increase the earning potential of these students and thereby increase the amount they would pay in taxes back to the state. But opponents of the legislation say that it would provide an incentive for illegal immigration.
The DREAM Act has yet to receive support from Republicans in the State Senate and from Governor Andrew Cuomo. The governor declined to add the DREAM Act to the state budget passed on April 1, frustrating many of the bill’s supporters.
The governor’s refusal to add the bill to the state budget prompted Fernandez and the other undocumented students from the New York State Youth Leadership Council to march all the way to Albany to gather support for the legislation.
Along the way, Fernandez says, the marchers have received a great deal support. They stop at colleges and give presentations about the DREAM Act and share their own stories with other students.
Drivers passing them on the road to Albany honk their support and sometimes pull over to ask the marchers about their cause. As the walkers head upstate into more conservative districts, Fernandez says they’ve been getting some thumbs down signs from drivers disapproving of their message.
“It’s kind of a challenge, but it inspires us more,” she says.
Once they reach Albany, Fernandez and the other marchers plan to meet individually with state lawmakers to ask for their support for the legislation.
If the DREAM Act is passed New York will be the fourth state, after California, New Mexico and Texas, to institute the legislation.
Although the New York State DREAM Act would grant tuition assistance to undocumented students, it would not grant them citizenship. Congress voted down the federal DREAM Act in 2010 that would have granted citizenship to students like Fernandez, despite poll numbers that showed that the majority of Americans favored the legislation.
Although undocumented students won’t get citizenship New York State should still pass its own DREAM Act, says Angy Rivera, another member of the New York State Youth Leadership Council.
“We want to push this positive legislation to send a message to the federal government, especially after some of the negative legislation that has been passed like SB 1070 in Arizona,” Rivera said.
But the DREAM Act’s opponents worry that the bill will encourage future illegal immigration to the state.
Dr. Stanley Renshon, a fellow at the Center for Immigrations Studies and political science professor at the City University of New York, points out that the bill has no cut-off date for when a student should have arrived in the U.S. to be eligible for financial aid.
The federal DREAM Act, for instance, said that only students who had been living in the country for five years before the date the bill was passed would be eligible. But without a cut-off date, future illegal immigrants would be able to benefit from the New York DREAM Act, Renshon says.
Senator Bill Perkins (D-30th), who sponsored the bill, contends that it won’t encourage future illegal immigration.
“There’s no evidence that the floodgates would be wide open like some might suggest,” he says.
Perkins calls Governor Cuomo the most important figure in determining if the bill gets passed, and recently wrote a letter to the governor urging his support. Governor Cuomo’s office did not respond to requests for comment for this article.
Renshon says that the governor has to consider the widespread public sympathy for DREAM Act kids, but also could be hurt politically if he’s seen as supporting legislation that would benefit future illegal immigrants.
“The governor has a gauntlet to walk,” he says. “But if he’s smart he’ll figure out a way to find common ground.”
DREAM Act supporters hope the governor will come around in support of the bill.
“This is consistent with everything he’s said about immigrants and education,” says Chung-Wha Hong, the executive director of the New York Immigration Coalition, an advocacy group that is petitioning for the legislation.
Hong points out that the state Education Department, the State University of New York’s Board of Trustees and the state Regent’s Board all support the legislation.
Supporters of the state DREAM Act hope to get it passed in Albany by June, when the current legislative session ends. If the bill isn’t passed this session then undocumented students in this year’s high school graduating classes across New York State will, like Marlen Fernandez, be ineligible for state financial aid.
Fernandez lives with the threat of deportation now that she has come out as undocumented to support the DREAM Act. But she says that she has accepted that risk because she feels its time to take a stand on this issue.
“If you have the ambition, whether you’re documented or undocumented, you should have the opportunity to get an education,” she says as she continues her march to Albany.