Gotham Gazette

The Place for New York Policy and politics

CITY

City

As Calls for New Board of Elections Head Resume, Council Member Ulrich Pursues Post


cm eric ulrich epc

Council Member Eric Ulrich (photo: John McCarten/City Council)


With 2019 voting in the books and a major election year on the horizon, a behind-the-scenes effort is underway to replace the executive director of the New York City Board of Elections, a quasi-city agency with a reputation for mismanagement and political patronage. City Council Member Eric Ulrich, a Queens Republican, is expressing interest in the position and says he may soon have the support necessary to be appointed by the board’s commissioners.  

The BOE is essentially a state entity but is funded in the city budget. The board itself is composed of ten commissioners, two from each borough, with one Democrat and one Republican as nominated by the local party leaders. The commissioners then appoint an executive director to handle the day-to-day operations of the agency and its staff. Ryan, an attorney from Staten Island, has served in that position since 2013, but like his predecessors he has struggled to professionalize the agency and has faced calls for his resignation.

As this year’s election season, the first with early voting and other recent reforms in place, is wrapping up with final votes counted and results certified, legislative bodies at the city and state levels have been taking stock of the BOE’s performance. And while Ryan and the agency have received some praise for the inaugural early voting period, long-standing interest in him being replaced has led to a new flurry of activity, Gotham Gazette has learned. That activity includes Ulrich’s pursuit of the position, he said during a Friday interview.

While the City Council does have the power to confirm BOE nominees put forth by the borough leaders of the two political parties, the BOE’s structure under the law means that the Council can scrutinize the agency’s performance in oversight hearings, but cannot mandate any reforms. That has proven to be a constant source of frustration after repeated instances of failures by the BOE to conduct efficient elections.

For instance, after the 2016 presidential primary, it emerged that thousands of voters had been improperly purged from the voter rolls, prompting a $20-million offer from Mayor Bill de Blasio to make much needed improvements, which the board rejected. The board later conceded that it violated state and federal laws for the voter purge. During elections, long lines at the polls and broken-down voting machines are common sources of frustration. The board has also been criticized for failing to inform voters when their poll sites are moved, among other complaints.

Government reform groups and elected officials have sought to pressure the BOE to improve, criticizing its hiring, often based on political patronage, and contracting processes. The BOE, however, has been resistant to those external calls. Ryan, as the face of the board, has borne the brunt of the criticism and has been the cause of it as well.

Last year, just weeks after an abysmally managed Election Day, NY1 reported that Ryan had accepted paid trips from a voting machine manufacturer that supplies the city and stands to gain further from Ryan’s sway and insights. The mismanagement of the election and the subsequent conflict of interest allegation prompted wide calls for Ryan’s resignation, including from City Council Speaker Corey Johnson, City Comptroller Scott Stringer, and other elected officials and good government groups. 

Though the BOE did receive some praise for this most recent election, it will have its work cut out in 2020. There are three major election events next year – the presidential primary in April, state and congressional primary in June, and the general election in November. Turnout will also be much higher than in 2019, which saw few competitive races across the city. 

“We’ve seen long-standing issues with the executive director of the [BOE],” said Susan Lerner, executive director of Common Cause New York, a government reform advocacy group, specifically citing the conflict of interest issues, which led Ryan to announce changes to his behavior. “He has been leading the board in a direction which is very disquieting, where the business plan of the vendor seems to be taking precedence over the needs of the voter.”

Lerner emphasized the need to professionalize the ranks of the BOE and, to the extent possible short of state law change, move it in a nonpartisan direction. 

That’s a task that’s easier said than done. The nominations of BOE commissioners by the county party bosses are rarely contested, particularly considering that they are approved by their allies in the Council. Lerner said the process should be more public facing. “Voters and the public interest must be first and foremost as we go into the 2020 election,” she said. “Voters seem to have no role in our election and election administration process. It's just backwards. We have an antiquated 19th-century approach to election administration.”

She added, “If there's going to be a change, it should be made now, because there's a lot that needs to be done to gear up for 2020, including getting procedures in place, locations and procedures for early voting, we need more professional staff and quickly, and to run it all effectively.” 

Council Member Ulrich, who is term-limited from running for his current seat again in 2021, the next city election cycle, told Gotham Gazette he has had conversations in recent weeks with county leaders from both parties about the job. “I'm very interested in going into the Board of Elections and turning that place around,” he said in a phone interview. 

“The Board of Elections is in dire need of reform. It has been, for a very long time, a dysfunctional place and I would say most New Yorkers lost confidence in the board’s ability to conduct efficient elections a long time ago,” Ulrich said. “And the board hasn’t done a very good job of restoring the public trust or confidence in how the Board of Elections actually carries out the election.”

Ulrich, one of three Republicans in the 51-member City Council, is not a partisan hardliner and is far more moderate than most members of his own party, often finding common ground with Democrats on legislation. He regularly argues in support of campaign finance and voting reforms that are opposed by most Republicans, but he is also not closely aligned with any Democratic power-brokers.

“I don't have the same political constraints that someone else might have,” he said. “I would really be able to go in there and truly be independent and manage the agency more effectively than it is currently being managed.” Acknowledging the major task at hand with both reforming the operations of the BOE and implementing the elections of 2020 (and beyond), Ulrich said he would aggressively act to clean up the agency and that he has enough familiarity with its operations to be able to hit the ground running.

In order to be appointed executive director, Ulrich would need the votes of six commissioners on the board. He said he’s counting on affirmative votes from the four Republican commissioners – there is a vacancy for the Republican commissioner from the Bronx – and said that he has spoken with Democratic county leaders to court their support. He said, though that only certain Democratic leaders appear open to his candidacy.

Ulrich said that commissioners appointed by the more powerful Queens and Bronx Democratic county machines are “very much opposed” to him replacing Ryan. The Queens and Bronx Democrats helped elect Johnson as speaker of the Council. It’s unclear what role Johnson or those two county parties are playing in the process of possibly replacing Ryan in leading the BOE.

“There are some county leaders in the city of New York who like the status quo, who like the patronage jobs, and who don't want anything to change,” Ulrich said. “And that is to be expected. I don't expect to win over their support. But I think that there is definitely momentum for changing the leadership of the Board of Elections, and there's frustration on the part of some others who feel like the places is operating, not in the 21st century.”

“It doesn't take a political scientist or rocket scientist to know that the Board of Elections desperately needs...an extreme makeover,” he added.

Neither Johnson’s nor de Blasio’s office provided Gotham Gazette with comment for this article.

A source familiar with the backroom negotiations told Gotham Gazette that Ulrich is currently close to securing five votes, indicating that at least one Democratic commissioner is willing to back him as he pursues a sixth and decisive vote. Ryan is a Staten Island Democrat himself, adding complication to how the borough’s leadership may act; Brooklyn Democratic leadership has often acted in opposition to that of Queens and the Bronx, and Manhattan Democrats are the most open to various compromises.

Lerner, for one, said she would support Ulrich to be the next executive director. “To the extent that there's an ongoing desire to replace the executive director with someone who is reform-minded and has a good track record of working with people across the political spectrum, Eric would be a good choice," she said when asked about his candidacy. “Replacing Mike Ryan with another person whose primary focus is on keeping the political leadership happy would be a tragic misstep as we go into 2020.”

***
by Samar Khurshid, senior reporter, Gotham Gazette
     

Read more by this writer.

Ben Max contributed to this article.

Turnout, Ballot Questions, & Dropoff: How New York City Voted in 2019


voting new york city

(photo: Michael Appleton/Mayor's Office)


A year after the 2018 election cycle, when insurgent candidates and heightened political participation helped drive a wave of New Yorkers to the polls, voter turnout in the city this fall continued the trend. While still low as a percentage of registered voters, the 15 percent turnout was far higher than previous off-year elections.

While many attribute the recent increases in voter participation to a Trump effect, the particulars of this year’s city ballot, including key items not present in the corresponding cycle four years ago, may also have had an effect: a citywide Public Advocate election and five ballot questions offering New Yorkers the chance to approve or reject changes to city elections and governance.

Yet while the series of proposed city charter amendments may have motivated some voters to the polls, new analysis shows the questions did not generate as much interest as the public advocate candidates at the top (and front) of the ballot.

New maps created by Steven Romalewski, director of the Mapping Service at the Center for Urban Research, CUNY Graduate Center, using voter turnout data from the New York City Board of Elections show that, while turnout was relatively high across the board, there was significant drop-off from the top and front of the ballot -- where candidate races are listed -- to the ballot proposals on the back.

Romalewski’s analysis also shows the places where turnout was highest (Upper West Side, Brooklyn Heights, and Park Slope) and lowest (parts of the southern Bronx and southern Brooklyn) and illustrates where voters seemed especially motivated to vote on the charter changes.

Of the nearly 4.8 million active registered voters in New York City, 15 percent went to the polls over the two weeks they were open this fall, according to still-unofficial city turnout data and the most recent state voter registration numbers released at the beginning of November. By comparison, in the 2015 general election turnout was just 6 percent, according to the New York City Campaign Finance Board, though there was no citywide race or charter amendments on the ballot that year.

The increased turnout follows an election last year where turnout was uncommonly high at 39.1 percent, according to the Campaign Finance Board. It also coincides with a number of long-sought voting reforms passed by the State Legislature after Democrats took control of both chambers following the so-called “blue wave” elections of 2018. Among them was early voting, a change advocates argued would improve access to the ballot box, which went into effect this fall. For the first time, city voters had the opportunity to vote early at 61 assigned poll sites over the course of nine days leading up to Election Day, November 5, when thousands of traditional poll sites opened citywide.

The highest profile race this fall was for public advocate, the only citywide elected office on the ballot, where Democratic incumbent Jumaane Williams beat Republican City Council Member Joe Borelli and Libertarian nominee Devin Balkind to keep the seat he had won earlier this year in a nonpartisan special election.

Williams won handily with nearly 78 percent of the vote in a city where registered Democrats outnumber Republicans close to seven to one. In addition to Williams’ race, as well as a City Council contest to fill the seat he vacated and a handful of judicial races, the ballot contained the five referenda encompassing 19 charter amendments put forward by the 2019 Charter Revision Commission.

Voters overwhelmingly approved all five questions, with the 19 proposals dealing with elections and governance, by between 71 and 77 percent.

In five maps provided to Gotham Gazette, Romalewski breaks down turnout data and ballot referenda voting by Assembly district using unofficial election night results in which roughly nine out of ten ballot scanners were counted. Official results are expected to be certified soon.

In the areas with the highest turnout, like the Upper West Side, Brooklyn Heights, and Park Slope, nearly 24 percent of registered voters cast ballots for public advocate, according to the analysis. The neighborhoods with the lowest turnout, like the West Bronx, Mott Haven, Parkchester, and Bensonhurst saw just 10 percent or less of registered voters go to the polls (see map below).

pubadv roma map

The Upper West Side and Brooklyn Heights saw close to the same high turnout on proposal 5 as they did for public advocate -- 22.4 percent (see map below). But much larger regions had turnout rates of 10 percent or less: all but three Bronx Assembly districts fall into this category, as well as Corona, East Elmhurst, and Flushing, Queens.

prop5 roma map

A vast majority of Assembly districts saw drop-off of between 1,000 and 2,889 votes from the top of the ballot to the back of it. The districts that saw the smallest drop-off -- under 1,000 votes -- were in parts of Lower Manhattan, the Upper East Side, Williamsburg and parts of the borough’s southern tier. The worst drop-off was in Upper Manhattan, the South Bronx, Eastern Queens, and parts of Central Brooklyn.

patoprop5 roma map

Despite what then-Public Advocate Letitia James described in July 2018 as “a rare opportunity to fundamentally change the future of our City” when the charter commission was empanelled through her legislation with Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer, a number of factors may have contributed to the drop-off on ballot proposals by the time the votes were cast.

Among them are the miniscule, 7.5-point font the ballot questions were printed in and the large amount of detail contained in each one. Another might be the limited public education conducted by government agencies in the run-up to the early voting period, or the fact that many of the city’s most prominent officials did not express positions on the proposals. There’s also the fact that the commission did not propose particularly sweeping changes to how city government functions, though ranked-choice voting, part of the first ballot question, is a major change.

All but one Assembly district in Queens, where there was a notable district attorney race, saw drop-off of more than 1,500 votes between the public advocate race and the fifth ballot proposal -- meaning many Queens voters were not taking stock of their entire ballot.

One district -- Assembly District 59 in Brooklyn -- had a drop-off of roughly a thousand more voters than any other district in Romalewski’s maps. That drop-off could actually be smaller because data for that district was available from only 78 percent of ballot scanners, compared to between 85 and 99 percent of scanners in most of the other districts, he explained in an email. When they are all counted the gap may shrink.

Another, and perhaps more notable, outlier is Assembly District 48 -- spanning Borough Park and Midwood, Brooklyn -- where there was actually a greater number of ballots marked for or against Question 1 than public advocate by 76 votes, according to one map (see below). Given its inclusion of ranked-choice voting, Question 1 was perhaps the most consequential and controversial of the ballot measures, especially among certain officials and groups. According to the unofficial election night results, voters in District 48 rejected Proposal 1 by a margin of 4,058 to 1,545, and the other four proposals by similar margins.

patoprop1 roma map

Ranked-choice voting, which for party primary and special elections will let voters list up to five candidates by preference rather than selecting a single top choice, received significant attention in the weeks leading up to Election Day, with groups campaigning for and against the proposal. The biggest proponents of the new method were a coalition of good government groups, voting rights advocates, and elected officials, which spent close to $1 million on advertising for it.

But five days ahead of Election Day, a group of city and state elected officials representing Orthodox Jewish communities in the Midwood area of Brooklyn began appearing in digital, print, and radio ads urging voters to reject all five ballot proposals, according to data from the Campaign Finance Board. The images of Assembly Member Simcha Eichenstein, who represents District 48, along with State Senator Simcha Felder and City Council Members Kalman Yeger and Chaim Deutsch graced the English- and Hebrew-language ads, often accompanied by text reading: “If approved, these proposals will waste money, make our streets more dangerous and give our community less say in our city government. Help protect our voice.”

A total of $22,150 was spent on the ads over five days, according to campaign finance filings. They were paid for by the Police Benevolent Association Independent Expenditure Committee, which was also pouring money into a parallel campaign to defeat a proposal, in Question 2, that would enhance civilian oversight of the NYPD. The PBA spent a total of $139,626 on its “Vote No on Question 2” campaign, which includes the $22,150 geared toward Orthodox Jewish voters.

Two days before Election Day, the City Council’s Black, Latino and Asian Caucus also spent $5,000 on leaflets opposing ranked-choice voting, even though some of its members were proponents of a yes vote on Question 1.

One map shows that not only was there relatively high turnout for public advocate -- between 15,000 and 24,200 votes -- in the western half of lower Manhattan, as many as 99 percent of those voters also voted for or against proposal 5 on the back. The same map shows a number of districts where turnout was as low as 4,145 and down-ballot drop-off was between 25 and 33 percent. Those districts fall mostly in northeast Queens and the South Bronx (see map below).

prop5percentpubadv roma map

But in Assembly District 48, the opposite was true: voters there cast ballots for public advocate in relatively small numbers (between 4,145 and 7,500) but those that did were highly motivated to vote on the ballot proposals as well. As many as 99 percent of them voted on proposal 5 at the end of the ballot, Romalewski pointed out in an email.

While all five ballot questions passed citywide and in almost every borough, Staten Island voters rejected three of them, including the ranked-choice voting and police oversight proposals (Questions 1 and 2, respectively), as well as one related to the city budget (Question 4). The widest vote margin of the rejected proposals on Staten Island, where voters tend to be more conservative than the rest of the city and where many police officers live, was on the police-related reforms.

There, in addition to the PBA campaign against the police oversight amendments, several local elected officials joined PBA President Pat Lynch and other law enforcement union leaders days before Election Day to rally in opposition to the proposal. Borelli, who received nearly twice as many votes on Staten Island as Williams in the public advocate race, was among them.

***
by Ethan Geringer-Sameth, reporter, Gotham Gazette
     

Read more by this writer.

Note: this article has been updated.

24 City Council Members Call on MTA to Address 'Over-Policing,' End Fare Evasion Crackdown


fulton wt

(photo: Benjamin Kanter/Mayoral Photo Office)


Last month, two videos of incidents in Brooklyn emerged on social media that led to a public furor over policing in the city’s subway system. In one, several police officers aimed their guns at an unarmed young black man (and many fellow passengers nearby) and then aggressively arrested him despite him having shown no indication of resistance. In the second, an officer could be seen punching black teenagers in the face as other officers attempted to bring a stop to a brawl in a subway station.

Those incidents were widely seen as a result of increased police presence in the subways owing to an MTA and NYPD crackdown on fare evasion, homelessness, and other so-called quality-of-life issues that has prompted criticism from many quarters, amplified when two churro vendors were handcuffed by officers in separate recent incidents caught on camera.

These events and others have occurred during the already-announced crackdown and as the MTA, at the direction of Governor Andrew Cuomo and with support from Mayor Bill de Blasio, moves to hire 500 additional transit system police officers, a plan that has also been panned by many advocates and elected officials as misguided on fiscal and social counts.

On Monday, 24 New York City Council members cited the two Brooklyn incidents in a letter to MTA Chair and CEO Pat Foye, calling for an alternative approach that would address the root causes of fare evasion rather than its symptoms. The current approach, they wrote, “create(s) yet another platform for criminalization and over-policing in de facto poorer communities, often escalating into unnecessarily violent situations.”

In an agreement between Cuomo and de Blasio, the MTA and NYPD have together diverted 500 officers to curb fare evasion, which the MTA has said cost it $215 million in lost revenue last year, though the authority’s inspector general has called the numbers into question. The governor also insisted that the MTA add the 500 additional police officers to its payroll – estimated to cost nearly $260 million over four years and $663 million over ten years for the deficit-running authority – to address fare evasion, homelessness, and attacks on transit workers. The governor has cited an uptick in crime that is not shown in the data for the most serious crimes, though misdemeanor reports are up, in some ways the apparent result in increased reporting by straphangers physically assaulted or violated in some way. 

In the letter led by Council Majority Leader Laurie Cumbo, a Brooklyn Democrat, the Council members said the MTA should reduce transit fares statewide and also institute community-based de-escalation and anti-bias training for its officers. They cited the city’s Fair Fares initiative, which provides discounted MetroCards to low-income New Yorkers and has been rolled out to over 80,000 city residents already, and pointed to other reduced-fare initiatives of the MTA, the Atlantic Ticket and Freedom Ticket programs.

“Civilians’ lives are in unnecessary danger and the racially-charged tensions of youth and police officers continue to grow. We believe these changes will result in fewer arrests, as over-policing Black and Brown neighborhoods is simply not the answer,” the Council members wrote.

While he is not a signatory on the latter, in a statement to Gotham Gazette Council Speaker Corey Johnson said, “I know how important it is for New Yorkers to feel safe on the subways, but I have consistently voiced concerns about the additional 500 officers on the subway having the effects of criminalizing poverty and over-policing our mass transit system. I believe the funding for the additional police presence would be better spent on improving service for straphangers and that we should focus on programs like Fair Fares which try to get at the root of these issues.”

Asked about the hiring plan several times in recent months, Mayor de Blasio has said he welcomes the additional MTA officers patrolling the subways and believes a vast majority New Yorkers do too.

MTA spokesperson Shams Tarek gave a similar rationale. “The safety of our customers and employees is our top priority and we’ve responded to calls from many of them to have more police to help provide a safe and secure transit environment,” Tarek said in a statement to Gotham Gazette when asked about the Council members’ letter. “Our multipronged approach to public safety and combating fare evasion is just one part of those efforts, with de-escalation and implicit bias training, programs to educate the public about how fare evasion hurts all riders, and our strong support for progressive programs such as Fair Fares and Atlantic Ticket, which are both underway and helping thousands of New Yorkers gain affordable access to the subway and buses.”

While the letter is addressed to Foye and the MTA, the sentiment has also been shared by many Council members with respect to the ongoing crackdown on fare evasion and other subway-related issues that the NYPD and MTA have already been implementing.

A separate incident in East Harlem last week, where four police officers arrested and tackled a young black man accused of selling candy on the subway platform, prompted a rebuke from Manhattan’s Community Board 11. The board adopted a resolution by an overwhelming majority vote on Tuesday night that called on Cuomo to scrap the plan to hire 500 new MTA police officers and spend that money on improving mass transit instead. It also urged Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance, who is providing $40 million for the initial deployment of the 500 officers, to reinvest his funding in reentry programs for people leaving prison.

According to Jason Wu, a CB11 member who drafted the resolution, several elected officials or their representatives spoke at the Tuesday meeting and generally condemned the MTA’s fare evasion enforcement, Wu told Gotham Gazette in an email.

The MTA Board will vote on the authority’s new operating budget in December, at which time the initial investments in the new officers would be officially committed.

Along with Cumbo, the other 23 signatories of the letter to the MTA are City Council Members Farah Louis, I. Daneek Miller, Rafael Espinal, Margaret Chin, Helen Rosenthal, Alicka Ampry-Samuel, Stephen Levin, Carlos Menchaca, Jimmy Van Bramer, Diana Ayala, Vanessa Gibson, Donovan Richards, Adrienne Adams, Karen Koslowitz, Costa Constantinides, Ben Kallos, Mark Levine, Brad Lander, Carlina Rivera, Inez Barron, Keith Powers, Chaim Deutsch and Mark Treyger. They are all Democrats, half of the 48 in the 51-seat chamber.

***
by Samar Khurshid, senior reporter, Gotham Gazette
     

Read more by this writer.



Print Friendly and PDF

Editor's Choice


Gotham Gazette: New York Voters Approve $4.2 Billion Environmental Bond Act
New York Voters Approve $4.2 Billion Environmental Bond Act
Gotham Gazette: 
New York City Voters Approve Racial Justice Ballot Measures
New York City Voters Approve Racial Justice Ballot Measures
Gotham Gazette: 
Housing Development in New York City Slows to a Crawl as Officials Debate Tax Incentives
Housing Development in New York City Slows to a Crawl as Officials Debate Tax Incentives
Gotham Gazette: 
City Council Examines Low Voter Turnout, Moving Local Elections to Even Years City Council Examines Low Voter Turnout, Moving Local Elections to Even Years