(photo: @CUNYedu)
A month into the City University of New York’s fall semester, the COVID-19 pandemic, budget cuts, a drop in student enrollment, and anxiety remain the hallmarks of an uncertain new period in the history of the nation’s largest public urban university system. CUNY has chosen to remain almost entirely virtual this semester, with fewer than 2 percent of the fall semester’s 50,000 classes occurring in person.
Preliminary figures show CUNY’s enrollment dropping by roughly 4.4% since last fall, according to a CUNY spokesperson who confirmed numbers first reported by The New York Post. About 271,000 students attend CUNY schools across a system including four-year and community colleges, as well as graduate schools. The spokesperson said that final numbers and breakdowns are not yet available, but would become available as the semester progresses and class lists solidify.
The hundreds of thousands of graduate and undergraduate students who remain enrolled across CUNY’s 25 campuses are now weeks into their courses. While distance learning is no longer the shock it was in March, bumps and pitfalls still remain, students said in interviews.
“I think our transition back has been pretty smooth,” said Ethan Milich, the student government president of Brooklyn College. “But there are going to be a lot of challenges and struggles as we come back. There has been, and there’s going to be.”
Each campus has an individualized reopening plan for the semester, which generally includes limited access to student services like food pantries and child care centers, and varying access to the campus for staff depending on the school. Classes that are able to return to campus vary by school, but involve a vital hands-on component, such as labs or some theater classes. Schools like Hunter College in Manhattan allow certain campus functions to be accessed by appointment, such instrument practice rooms and art studios.
Dormitories for students are reopened across the system, with social distancing measures and cleaning and quarantine procedures in place at each. According to reopening documents, interest in dorming varied by school, and not every school has a dormitory to begin with. The College of Staten Island, for example, was preparing for 200 to 300 students to return to its dormitories, while Hunter College found 400 students interested in returning. Even prior to the pandemic, interest in dorming at CUNY was relatively low compared to other colleges, as the majority of students are commuters.
Schools like Baruch College in Manhattan and Brooklyn College lay out specific, phased timelines that state that campuses will not reach 100 percent capacity for staff and students until a COVID-19 vaccine is found, or the virus is otherwise contained.
“This institution remains vital to the lifeblood of the region,” CUNY Chancellor Félix Matos Rodríguez said in a welcome message in mid-September. “We have spent months laying the groundwork to proceed in a manner that safeguards the health and wellbeing of the University community and does not in any way jeopardize or endanger the city’s ongoing recovery efforts.”
In a late-September interview with News 12, Matos Rodríguez said that for at least the beginning of the spring semester in 2021, classes would probably remain almost fully online. There would be an opportunity to start bringing students back into the classroom if the situation surrounding the virus improved, he continued, keeping CUNY on a more cautious schedule than New York City’s elementary and secondary public schools, which have now reopened to some students coming into school buildings each day.
CUNY’s approach is similar to its local, private peer Columbia University, which announced earlier this summer that all of its classes will occur virtually. Meanwhile, New York University reconvened around half of its classes in-person this fall, with the option to take them remotely.
Remaining Economically Accessible
The onset of COVID-19 pandemic triggered a complex series of questions for CUNY, and one of the most pressing remains the question of accessibility. The university serves an overwhelming number of low-income students, with 60 percent of undergraduates reporting in a 2016 survey that their annual household income is less than $30,000.
The pandemic only served to widen and deepen this economic instability for CUNY students. At a City Council oversight hearing in June, university polling revealed that nearly 40 percent of students lost their jobs since the pandemic began, and 55 percent were experiencing housing insecurity.
The dawn of remote learning in March has only thrown these statistics into sharper relief. Soon after campuses shut down, CUNY again paused classes for a five-day “recalibration period” to frantically try to distribute 30,000 laptops and tablets to students in need across the system. For the fall semester, the university purchased thousands of WiFi hotspots to continue to help students attend class on time and in full capacity.
Now, as CUNY faces down a pandemic-induced budget crisis that prompted the university to lay off almost 3,000 adjunct professors, some students worry that they and their cash-strapped classmates will be footing part of that bill.
“We don’t want the state to continue to balance their checkbooks on the backs of students,” said Timothy Hunter, the chairperson of the University Student Senate, a student-led governing body for the entire university system. Hunter is additionally the only student representation on CUNY’s board of trustees.
Full-time tuition costs can range from $4,800 to $18,600, but state residents who attend the four-year colleges full-time pay $6,930 per year. However, the majority of CUNY students qualify for state or federal financial aid grants, and more than 58 percent of full-time, undergraduate students attended the university tuition-free the last academic year.
Students haven’t yet seen the tuition increase and new health and wellness fee that the board voted to implement last December, but the looming threat remains, and concerned Hunter. In a typical year, lobbying to freeze tuition is one of USS’ top priorities, but the pandemic has created a new sense of urgency.
“I think the biggest concern [for CUNY] moving forward is going to be affordability, as it's always been,” Hunter said.
New Realities On And Off Campus
For now, CUNY is relying on health checks and remote learning to try and keep the coronavirus at bay. Students who need to enter campus must use an app to perform a wellness check survey, as well as wear masks and practice social distancing once on campus.
“We go based on the honor system. We have to take accountability,” said Wilkins Cerda, the president of York College’s student government and a nursing student. Cerda said he has not yet been on the Queens-based campus, though he has heard from fellow nursing students who need to take lab classes that there is social distancing and extra personal protective equipment in those classes. He still attends his clinicals in person, however, at Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan.
Though CUNY has worked to try and solve some of the glaring issues around virtual classes, like the need for devices, the typical struggles that plague technology — such as poor connections, and a lack of tech savviness in some users — persist. Some students have expressed concerns over privacy and security of tech platforms, said both Cerda and Milich, the student government president of Brooklyn College. Milich said that classes can also still have problems with “Zoom-bombing,” or when often unidentified individuals hijack and disrupt a video call.
Student clubs and organizations have moved almost entirely to Zoom and other online meeting applications, students from across the system said. In a typical year, these clubs are important pathways for students to make friends and connect with the school, as the majority of students do not live in campus housing.
Levels of activity vary by campus. Cerda said that York typically has around 40 active clubs, though that number has dropped into the single digits this semester as clubs struggle with the limitations of being solely virtual. CUNY colleges charge a “student activity fee” to maintain this programming, which can range from anywhere between $60 to $180 for full-time students and can pay for clubs, athletics, student centers, health programming, student media and other services on campus.
“Right now, there’s not much that they would want to do, because a lot of them [host] events that are face-to-face,” Cerda said.
Meanwhile, on Brooklyn College’s campus, clubs and the student government have been striving to maintain participation, trying new strategies to reach students such as social media groups and chat applications like Discord.
“[There’s] almost more enthusiasm now, because students haven’t seen each other, they haven’t interacted, so now they’re really excited to get this kicked off,” Milich said. He found that participation in student government actually went up when it moved online.
Marziya Hasan, a freshman at Baruch College, said that she won’t be joining clubs this year as she focuses on her classes. One of Hasan’s biggest challenges has been staying motivated and on top of her work while she’s been stuck at home.
“Baruch’s doing a lot to make freshmen feel that they’re getting the best experience out of this,” she said, though she wishes that she could have safely started her college experience in person, as she would have done in a more typical year. “It really doesn’t feel the same.”
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by Victoria Merlino, Gotham Gazette
@GothamGazette @victoriamerlin0
NYC BOE Executive Director Michael Ryan (photo: John McCarten/City Council)
The New York City Board of Elections has not submitted a state-mandated report on its staffing needs for this fall, blowing past a September 20 deadline set by Governor Andrew Cuomo and raising concerns about the city's preparedness for the consequential general election. It is the only jurisdiction in the state to miss the deadline, according to officials at the State Board of Elections, to which the reports are due.
The mandate and deadline, set in a late-August executive order, was intended to ensure election administrators were ready for a record number of votes, and ready to count them quickly, including a quantity of mailed-in ballots expected to dwarf what they faced in the chaotic June primaries. The report's delay comes when officials, including Cuomo, are questioning the competence of the city's election system, operating amid a pandemic, after a vendor mishap led to nearly 100,000 absentee ballots being mailed to the wrong voters in Brooklyn and Queens.
The order required local boards to submit to the State Board of Elections staffing plans and needs for early voting and Election Day, and for the counting of ballots after polls close. The deadline was intended "to provide adequate time for the state Board of Elections to assist as feasible," according to the order.
With President Trump repeatedly raising the spectre of voter fraud and questioning the validity of future election results, at times pointing to issues in New York as justification, a growing concern is the time it will take administrators to count ballots and certify a winner. As in the June primaries, the city BOE is expecting that process to take up to six weeks because of the large proportion of mailed-in ballots that must be counted by hand and cross-checked against votes cast throughout the state.
"I'm issuing today's executive order because we want boards of elections to count votes efficiently and we want them to get it right, but we want it done in a timely manner," Cuomo said in a statement on August 24.
"We don't want to hear after-the-fact excuses for why you couldn't do it," he told reporters the same day. "Tell us how you're going to do it before-the-fact, and your staffing plan from the board of elections that will actually do that."
"This election is going to be one of the most critical in modern history. It will be controversial," he added.
The New York City Board of Elections, which encompasses all five boroughs, is the only board in the state not to submit a report. "They still have failed to provide the required plan after numerous follow up requests," wrote State Board of Elections Co-Chair Douglas Kellner in an email to Gotham Gazette Tuesday.
The New York City Board of Elections did not provide a comment for this article. Cuomo's office did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Good government group Reinvent Albany criticized the failure.
"Once again, the City BOE has failed to take the necessary steps to ensure New York is prepared for the next election," wrote Tom Speaker, the group's elections analyst, in an email. "No one will be surprised if November produces the same turmoil that New Yorkers saw in the June primary. We call on the City Council and State legislature to start taking steps to abolish the NYC BOE and replace it with a professional, nonpartisan agency."
The State Board has reviewed personnel surveys from the 57 county boards outside New York City and is closely monitoring 11 boards in particular, according to a spokesperson. The boards have benefited from a national poll worker recruitment effort on September 1, that grew the pool of election workers, clerks, and custodians available to administrators. Many boards reported scheduling additional inspector training sessions to manage the influx, the spokesperson said.
The city BOE has also missed another report deadline, this one on its implementation of a separate executive order requiring it to establish dropboxes for absentee ballots at BOE offices and poll sites. The Board has announced that it will have a dropbox at every early voting and Election Day poll site, and at each of its borough offices, fulfilling the requirement of the order.
"While it is very clear from Ms. Sandow's and Mr. Ryan's testimony that they do have the dropbox program licked, and I am pleased with their efforts on that, they have not provided the report, which is required by the governor," Kellner said Friday at an oversight hearing conducted by the City Council's governmental operations committee, referring to the city BOE's executive director and his deputy.
"It just raises another concern about the lack of attention to detail," he said.
***
by Ethan Geringer-Sameth, reporter, Gotham Gazette
@GeringerSameth @GothamGazette
Early voting at a poll site can be a breeze (photo: @BOENYC)
As election administrators across the state prepare themselves for a second, larger wave of mass absentee voting this fall, officials and voting advocates are encouraging as many voters as possible to take advantage of the state's in-person early voting option as an alternative to crowded Election Day poll sites and the uncertainty of casting a ballot by mail.
Early voting, first launched statewide in 2019, will be offered this fall from October 24 through November 1 and gives all voters the chance to vote in person at designated poll sites over nine days leading up to Election Day, which is November 3. This year, with all voters eligible to vote by absentee ballot, the New York City Board of Elections is expecting as many as 1 million mail-in ballots, which take longer to count and are prone to being rejected on minor grounds.
Roughly a fifth of all absentee ballots are thrown out each election due to technicalities like missing a signature on the outer envelope, or being partially unsealed. That was no trivial proportion in the June primaries. About 80,000 mailed ballots, out of the 400,000 cast citywide, were rejected on technicalities and the high volume meant officials couldn't deliver election results until six weeks after polls closed on June 23.
Only about 52,000 people across the five boroughs took advantage of the early voting period in June.
While state lawmakers have made some adjustments to election law to help reduce the risk that ballots are thrown out, a number of proposed fixes were never passed, errors in the fall process are already showing up, and timeliness remains a major concern. With another slew of absentee ballots expected this fall, Michael Ryan, the NYC BOE's executive director, recently said election results may not be available until the first or second week of December.
Absentee voting was expanded by executive order this spring and later by state law to ensure voters had an option that didn't require them to risk transmitting or contracting COVID-19 at a poll site. Early voting, which spreads the number of open poll site hours across more than a week, including some evenings and weekends, offers similar protection from often packed Election Day polling places but allows votes to be tallied the same day using ballot scanning machines. The option is looking increasingly attractive to voting advocates, given the stresses of the primaries and anxiety about how the results of the presidential election will be handled, particularly by President Trump.
"The key to protecting voting rights in this climate is ensuring voters are aware of their new options so they can make an informed voting plan, help loved ones do the same, and take early action well ahead of unforgiving deadlines," wrote Jarret Berg, an election lawyer and co-founder of the advocacy group Vote Early NY, by email.
“While voting remotely may be safer and more convenient for some New Yorkers, early voters will scan their marked ballots immediately, just like on Election Day, avoiding potential pitfalls that can jeopardize rights," Berg said, adding that ballots cast during early voting are tabulated in the unofficial results reported on election night.
Elections administrators are also emphasizing the early voting option, as are other public officials like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who recently tweeted that she would be voting early and in person, and encouraging others to plan to do the same.
"Early voting will be a critical part of managing the election, given the anticipated record turnout," wrote NYC BOE Commissioner Tiffany Townsend, in an email to Gotham Gazette. "There will be thousands of new absentee voters, but many more who will prefer to cast their votes in person."
"The additional nine days [of voting] - combined with our dropbox option - will help mitigate potential wait times both outside and inside poll sites. That’s a huge plus," Townsend wrote.
City and state agencies are rolling out a series of public awareness campaigns to educate voters on their options, leveraging partnerships with grassroots organizations and media companies.
All of the funding allocated to promote early voting comes from New York City government or private grants.
The New York City Board of Elections is spending a total of $1.5 million on advertising about the three voting options, according to Valerie Vazquez-Diaz, the board's director of communications and public affairs. That money will go toward advertising in citywide and hyper local newspapers, including non-English publications, as well as subway and bus ads, Vazquez-Diaz told Gotham Gazette. The funding, which comes from city government, includes $500,000 for subway and bus advertising, $600,000 for digital advertising, and $400,000 for print media. NYC & Company, the city's official marketing organization, is also donating ad space to the BOE in the LinkNYC digital kiosks that populate some city sidewalks, according to Vazquez-Diaz.
On top of paid advertising, the NYC BOE will be posting key information on its Twitter and Facebook accounts and has been working with local elected officials, organizations, and community boards to promote the BOE's messaging, using educational toolkits developed by the Board.
Perhaps the most direct messaging will be in the BOE's mailer, which it is sending to each registered voter. The mailer is part of a directive from Governor Andrew Cuomo to local election boards to inform New Yorkers of the three voting options (absentee voting, early voting, Election Day voting). Local boards must include information on how to request an absentee ballot online and the location of each voter’s early voting and Election Day polling places.
The BOE's notice, which it began mailing last week, includes the hours of early voting as well as a magnetic fob that allows for faster, contactless check-in for in-person voting.
Separate from the BOE's efforts, the de Blasio administration is spending roughly half a million dollars to promote early voting through the mayor's DemocracyNYC initiative and the city's Campaign Finance Board, which has a voting awareness initiative called NYC Votes.
DemocracyNYC, which the mayor launched in 2018 to bolster participation in elections, worked with the city's new Civic Engagement Commission to develop a PSA "to encourage as many New Yorkers as possible to vote early if they would rather vote in-person," according to mayoral spokesperson Jose Bayona. The city is promoting the announcement on streaming services and radio, and is also taking out ads in the LinkNYC kiosks and local media, "placing a greater emphasis on the voting early option to cast a ballot," he wrote in an email.
"DNYC is spending $100,000 on streaming and radio advertising, and $37,000 allocated towards spending for a vote by mail PSA in more than 10 languages," Bayona wrote.
With the city facing a massive tax revenue shortfall, DemocracyNYC is working with an informal coalition of voting rights advocates, good government groups, and government agencies dubbed the Elections Consortium, which came together shortly after the coronavirus state of emergency was declared to ensure participation in the 2020 elections, to get unpaid messaging out to key constituencies.
The consortium, which is co-led by DemocracyNYC and the Campaign Finance Board, has produced literature and graphics to address frequently asked questions and is partnering with the nonprofit “F.Y. Eye” PSA network to help disseminate the messaging for free, which Bayona says will help provide timely information to voters in multiple languages.
The Campaign Finance Board (CFB) is putting another $400,000 directly toward an early voting advertising campaign that will launch on October 8, according to spokesperson Matthew Sollars.
Streaming ads will target youth and first-time voters, as well as certain geographic areas, and language and professional demographics, he said. The CFB is also launching a digital campaign emphasizing the convenience of early voting with an eye toward multiple groups of New Yorkers who may require flexibility in voting for different reasons, like parents with child-care responsibilities or food service workers who have long hours and multiple jobs.
The CFB's advertising will appear in over 40 community publications in English, Spanish, Chinese, Korean, and Bengali. Television ads will target viewers in Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx, and mobile advertising and websites and cellphone apps will place geo-specific messaging to people within a half-mile radius of an early voting site, letting them know they can vote nearby.
Posters in English and Spanish are being delivered to over 300 local businesses in the CFB's target neighborhoods, identified because they have large numbers of naturalized citizens and historically low voter turnout, particularly in parts of Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx, and in many cases the areas hit hardest by the coronavirus pandemic.
Outside of New York City, the State Board of Elections, the regulatory agency with oversight over the state's 62 county boards of elections, is promoting early voting this fall through social media and news releases, and is exploring the possibility of paid advertising through a $1.5 million grant from the Center for Election Innovation and Research, which it received last week, according to a spokesperson.
"That is the budget we working with to advertise the three voting options afforded to NYers (by absentee, early voting and election day) as well as promoting the safety precautions taken at poll sites during the pandemic (wear a mask, use sanitizer and expect to socially distance)." wrote Cheryl Couser, deputy director of public information at the State Board.
"We urge voters to make a plan to go vote!," she wrote in an email.
Spokespeople for Governor Cuomo and the state Division of the Budget did not comment on whether any state funds had been allocated to promote early voting. State agencies will be advertising the voting options on their social media platforms, according to a spokesperson for Cuomo.
"New York has to get this right," wrote Betsy Gotbaum, executive director of government reform group Citizens Union and former New York City Public Advocate, in an email. "We know that President Trump will not hesitate to highlight any confusion or delays to undermine the legitimacy of the election. The best way for New Yorkers to vote safely, avoid Election Day crowds, and ensure their vote is counted in a timely manner is to take advantage of Early Voting."
"We are pleased to see DemocracyNYC, the CFB and the NYCBOE in outreach to encourage early voting, and are glad they are targeting resources to young people and our city's diverse ethnic communities," Gotbaum wrote, adding: "It is unfortunate that the state has not allocated similar resources to this effort."
[See the early voting days and hours here; Find your early voting and Election Day poll sites here]
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by Ethan Geringer-Sameth, reporter, Gotham Gazette
@GeringerSameth @GothamGazette
Part of the new absentee ballot envelope design
The New York State Board of Elections has approved a new design for absentee ballot envelopes to be used statewide in the upcoming general election. The new layout, mandated by Governor Andrew Cuomo in an executive order, is intended to make it more obvious where a voter needs to provide a signature in order to have the ballot accepted by elections administrators under state law and avoid mass disqualification of absentee ballots as New York saw during the June primaries.
The design, shared by the State Board of Elections upon request by Gotham Gazette, is actually for three envelopes, which accompany every absentee ballot: an outer envelope, a return envelope, and what is known as the "oath envelope," which a voter must sign to certify they are registered and voting lawfully. The new oath envelopes will have a sizable red 'X' where the signature is required, an attempt to avoid the most common reason absentee votes were disqualified.
The envelopes, which were developed in consultation with Center for Civic Design and local boards of elections, were designed to have either one language (English), two languages, three languages, or five languages, depending on the jurisdiction. The number of languages required is dictated by the federal Voting Rights Act. For example, Brooklyn will have a three-language envelope and Queens will have a five-language envelope.
While Cuomo directed the State Board of Elections to develop the envelopes, they did not require his approval, according to a spokesperson for the governor.
Failing to provide a signature is a key reason absentee ballots were thrown out during the June primaries. The measure could help ensure that thousands of absentee ballots are counted in the general election that may otherwise have been tossed due to a missing oath. In New York City, 23 percent of the roughly 400,000 absentee ballots cast were rejected, "the overwhelming number" of which were for missing signatures on the oath envelope, according to Michael Ryan, the executive director of the New York City Board of Elections, in testimony to the New York City Council on Friday.
"I do not have a specific number but I can tell you that is going to be the vast majority," Ryan told the Council's Committee on Governmental Operations, which was conducting oversight over the June primaries and the upcoming general election, when asked by Chair Fernando Cabrera about the prevalence of the problem.
"This is directly analogous to election day," Ryan said. "A signature is the gateway to the ballot. If you do not provide a signature, you do not get a ballot."
"The only difference between election day and absentee balloting is the signature is captured in a different process but it must be captured nonetheless. And if it's not captured it's not valid," he added.
Election Day is on November 3 and New York's early voting period will be from October 24 to November 1. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, absentee voting eligibility has been extended to all registered voters and hundreds of thousands of absentee ballots have already been requested across the state. In addition to the presidency, many other federal, state, and local offices will also be on the ballot, including Queens Borough President.
Absentee ballots may also be rejected for other technicalities, including for having stray markings on the ballot or extraneous paper in the envelope, or for having an envelope that isn't fully sealed. Several pieces of legislation have been introduced to eliminate these obstacles, but not all of them have passed and been signed into law. One solution that was passed and will be in place for the general election is a measure that requires election administrators to notify voters when their ballot is rejected and give them an opportunity to fix the mistake.
But most of the errors are dwarfed by the frequency of missing signatures. Another reason some absentee ballots were rejected this summer is because the post office failed to postmark them, an issue beyond the control of voters. That was a particular issue in Brooklyn where roughly 4,500 un-postmarked ballots were initially rejected, according to Ryan (the other boroughs lost about 100 ballots each to the postmarking issue, he said), but later counted after a court challenge. In terms of other technicalities, "They really don't occur all that often," Ryan said.
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by Ethan Geringer-Sameth, reporter, Gotham Gazette
@GeringerSameth @GothamGazette
Voter registration (photo: Michael Appleton/Mayoral Photography Office)
A bill that would have made it possible for many thousands of New York City residents to register to vote online, which passed the State Senate but stalled in the Assembly earlier this year, is unlikely to pass before the general election registration deadline and would be too late to be implemented even if it did, officials say.
The legislation, first introduced in the summer of 2019, would allow the New York City Campaign Finance Board to open the online voter registration portal it created last year, pursuant to city law, which was blocked by the New York City Board of Elections, citing technical barriers in state law. After a chaotic primary season, the bill was passed by the State Senate's Democratic majority as part of a package of voting reforms, but was held in committee in the Assembly.
Assembly Member Charles Lavine, a Nassau County Democrat and chair of the chamber's election law committee, said the chances of lawmakers coming back into session before the general election was unlikely and the prospect of them taking up online voter registration in New York City was "very, very slim."
"This was something that came through the Senate very, very late, I think in late July and at that point the Assembly was primarily focused on a bill Latrice Walker had for statewide automatic voter registration," Lavine said, referring to legislation that would require some government agencies to register their clients starting in 2023, a form of which voting reform advocates have pushed for years.
"We still are considering this particular bill, however the likelihood of it being passed in time to make any meaningful difference, any difference whatsoever, this year is not likely," he said of online registration. Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie's office and Assemblymember Michael Blake, the bill's sponsor, did not respond to requests for comment on the status of the bill and why it hasn't advanced.
Lavine says it's unclear whether Heastie will call the body back into session before the election. "If we do go back to session, in all likelihood we'll be very preoccupied with issues involving state spending," he said, citing uncertainty around additional federal aid and referring to the state’s immense budget hole due to a massive drop in tax revenue because of the covid-related shutdown.
Matthew Sollars, a spokesperson for the Campaign Finance Board, told Gotham Gazette that at this late stage the portal would not be ready to launch by the October 9 registration deadline to vote in the general election. Early voting is set to occur October 24 through November 1, Election Day is November 3, and every eligible New Yorker is allowed to vote by absentee ballot due to coronavirus concerns.
With the presidency, state, and local offices on the ballot, the fall election is expected to shatter turnout records. State administrators are anticipating turnout to reach 8 million -- nearly three-quarters of the total registered population in a state that regularly lags behind national turnout rates.
The online voter registration bill would let New York City residents register via a Campaign Finance Board website until the state launches its own portal for all New York State residents, which was originally slated for April 2021. But one state election commissioner told Gotham Gazette that work on the state portal had been temporarily delayed due to fiscal belt-tightening, which could mean New York City residents will lack online registration through the consequential mayoral and other city government primaries in June 2021.
Voter registration has long faltered in New York City and State, where election rules are antiquated and cumbersome, and avenues to get on the rolls are limited. But in the first ten weeks of 2020, registration at both the city and state levels exceeded 2016 figures. Then the pandemic hit New York.
In mid-March, around the time Governor Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio declared states of emergency, the rate of registrations dropped significantly, falling below 2016 levels. By June, only about 80,000 New York City residents registered to vote, compared with 155,000 in the first half of 2016, according to the Campaign Finance Board. The divide between New York City and the rest of the state also widened during the pandemic, with new registrants outside of New York City surpassing 140,000 by June.
In 2017, the New York City Council passed a law mandating the development of an online voter registration system that would transmit a voter's information electronically to the BOE. The portal was developed by the city's Campaign Finance Board and ready to launch in 2019, but the BOE said the system, which allowed for only an electronic signature, violated the state's signature stipulations.
In June 2019, the BOE voted to require that people who register through the portal be mailed a separate form that they would have to sign and send back. Good government groups decried the decision, saying it made the city's online voter registration more complicated, not less. Since the decision, the Campaign Finance Board and voting advocates have been pushing legislators to pass the state bill authorizing the city's portal.
"We urge our state leadership to protect our democracy during this emergency by establishing an online voter registration system that all New Yorkers can access,” said Amy Loprest, executive director of the New York City Campaign Finance Board, in a statement on March 31. “With in-person voter registration events shut down, we are concerned that young voters and naturalized citizens, in particular, will be disenfranchised during this critical election year.”
The state law to create statewide online registration by 2021, passed before the BOE ruling and did not address the city's problem.
Currently, the only online voter registration in the state is through the Department of Motor Vehicles and requires a driver's license or other DMV-issued ID. In New York City, where public transportation options are abundant, DMV registrations accounted for only one in ten voter registration forms received by the Board of Elections, according to the Campaign Finance Board's annual election report in 2018.
More than 700,000 eligible New York City residents do not have a state driver's license or other DMV identification, according to a CFB spokesperson, who pointed out that over 430,000 young people (ages 18-29) qualify to be registered but are not.
"This was a bill that I think would have been really good to have passed earlier in the year and signed into law," said State Senator Zellnor Myrie, a Brooklyn Democrat, the bill's Senate sponsor, and Lavine's elections chair counterpart in the Legislature’s upper chamber, in a recent interview. "It would have been really helpful for us to give New Yorkers the option to register online, particularly when we have a system that is ready to go."
"It’s frustrating to know that an already created portal to allow New York City residents to register to vote online is waiting for the green light from the legislature at a time when enrollment has dropped significantly from where it was in prior presidential election years," wrote Jennifer Wilson, deputy director of the New York State League of Women Voters, a good government group, in an email.
Lavine said a number of obstacles prevented the bill from passing this year with its Senate companion, including the BOE's own limitations.
"We had staff members who had reached out to the city Board of Elections and they were preoccupied with trying to get ready for the November general election, which is understandable," Lavine said.
"No comment," wrote BOE spokesperson Valerie Vazquez in an email.
"Generally speaking, a lot of bills that concern the city Board of Elections will come from the city Board of Elections, which is not to say that this not a good idea, it is a good idea but it is still being analyzed," Lavine said.
Lavine also blamed cultural differences between the Senate and Assembly that give individual senators greater autonomy from the majority leader. "It is much easier for senators in the majority to get those passed. In the Assembly we have to take into consideration the fact that there are on any given day close to 110 members of the Assembly who are in the majority party. While in the Senate, we have 37 or 38 senators in the majority. Senate staff is allocated primarily to senators and in the Assembly we have a much stronger central staff, so it's a differently balanced system and has been for as long as I've been in the Assembly."
"This is how it goes sometimes. I'm going to continue to push and my hope is that we can get it across the finish line," Myrie told Gotham Gazette.
Even with citywide online voter registration off the table for the presidential election, the system could still be in place for next year's elections for mayor and other city offices. According to State Board of Elections Co-Chair Douglas Kellner, work on the state's online registration portal, which was slated to be up and running by April, had been paused for over four months due to budget cuts in response to New York's fiscal crisis.
"The funding had been suspended by the budget office shortly after the budget was adopted but it was unfrozen thanks to efforts by Senator Liz Krueger a couple of weeks ago," Kellner said over the phone. "So now it's back in process."
The citywide primaries, which are in most districts all but decisive in the heavily Democratic city, will take place in June 2021. Asked whether the temporary budget freeze would impact the April deadline, he said: "Somewhat, yes. As I say it's now back on the front burner and people are working on it, which was not the case from April until mid-August."
[See options for registering to vote by the October 9 deadline for this fall's elections here]
***
by Ethan Geringer-Sameth, reporter, Gotham Gazette
@GeringerSameth @GothamGazette
State Senator Michael Gianaris (photo: Senator Michael Gianaris' office)
September 23, 2020 - Max & Murphy Podcast: Senator Gianaris on Next Steps in New York's Recovery
State Senator Michael Gianaris of Queens joined the show to discuss next steps in reopening the New York economy, how the State Senate Democratic majority is thinking about addressing the state and city fiscal crises, and more.
Listen to the conversation and let us know what you think -- we're on Twitter @TweetBenMax and @JarrettMurphy. You can listen to the show through the embedded audio below or download the episode wherever you get your podcasts, under "Max & Murphy," and listen to Max & Murphy live on Wednesdays at 5 p.m. on WBAI radio, 99.5FM or wbai.org.
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by Ben Max, Gotham Gazette
@tweetBenMax @GothamGazette
State Senator Roxanne Persaud (photo: @SenatorPersaud)
Coinciding with the COVID-19 pandemic and resulting economic devastation, crime, particularly gun violence, has increased across New York City, a trend that began even before the coronavirus outbreak but has worsened since. The spike in shootings and murders has been particularly large in sections of Brooklyn. The 19th State Senate District, covering southeastern parts of the borough, including Canarsie, East New York, Brownsville, and Sheepshead Bay, and represented by longtime Senator Roxanne Persaud, has been among the hardest-hit areas. On Wednesday night, Persaud hosted a community conversation on the spike in gun violence in the neighborhoods she represents.
The district straddles the Brooklyn North and Brooklyn South NYPD commands, the former of which has been the subject of citywide attention for its crime rates over the past several months. Specifically, Persaud’s district includes the 61st, 63rd, and 69th Precincts in Brooklyn South and the 73rd and 75th Precincts in Brooklyn North, as well as Police Service Areas 1 and 2 (which cover the city’s housing developments) and Transit District 33.
In the Brooklyn South precincts, while year-to-date changes in shootings are negligible in the 61st Precinct, the 63rd Precinct, centered in Flatlands, has seen 11 shooting incidents so far this year (up 120% year-to-date) and the 69th Precinct of Canarsie, has seen 30 shooting incidents this year (up 400%), according to the NYPD’s CompStat. In the Brooklyn North precincts, the spike has been larger, in terms of raw numbers, with 74 shooting incidents in the 73rd Precinct, based in Brownsville, so far this year (up 184.6% year-to-date) and 78 in East New York’s 75th Precinct (up 76.7%). Murders are up 81.8% and 144.4% year-to-date in the 73rd and 75th precincts, respectively.
In this context, Senator Persaud hosted the town hall over Zoom with local community and faith leaders, which her office titled “The Causalities and Casualties of Gun Violence.” Participants included Dr. Jeffrey Gardere, a pastor and teacher at the Touro College of Osteopathic Medicine; Reverend Timothy Taylor of Hebron Baptist Church, a former Corrections Officer; Camara Jackson, executive director of Elite Learners Inc.; Rabbi Avrohom Hecht of the Canarsie JCC; Brother Paul Mohammad, a member of Community Board 5; Digna Layne, a member of the 73rd Precinct Council; Gardy Brazela, President of the 69th Precinct Council; and, Vincent Riggins, President of the Brite Leadershipship Coalition of East New York; as well as two young people from the district who are members of the NYPD Youth Explorers Program. (The Wednesday evening town hall, broadcast on Facebook Live, had around 50 viewers at any one point during the event.)
The pandemic in many ways has exacerbated an already-existing problem. The rise in murders in Brooklyn North was notable last summer and Senator Persaud, a Democrat, was quick to say that “This is not a new conversation.” She has been holding similar town halls since last November on the issue of gun violence in the district.
“Our kids should be able to walk from one building to another without fear,” Persaud said later. “The violence in our community is taking a mental toll on our community and we have to address that.”
The focus of the town hall was mostly local actions that can be taken to reduce gun violence, with sparing mention of citywide or statewide criminal justice efforts or broader policing policy. Throughout the town hall, Persaud repeatedly stressed the need for the community to “work with our NYPD partners,” striking a far different tone than recent calls from left-wing activists and elected officials to “defund the NYPD” and lining up more with several other Black elected officials who discussed the importance of fair but robust policing in their districts. In fact, none of the participants in the town hall voiced support for moving funds away from the NYPD as a means of solving the current gun violence crisis.
“I’m not fighting against the police. The police have a role in society,” said Persaud, who did support the recent series of criminal justice reforms passed by the Legislature she’s part of in Albany as one of 63 senators across the state, along with 150 Assembly members, which included major changes to bail laws. “We want our communities safe from every entity,” Persaud said. “It’s our kids dying by our hands. We have to stop pointing fingers.” The senator said she wanted the disparate community and faith organizations to coordinate their efforts more.
In addition to people working more closely with the NYPD, among the answers mentioned by Persaud and others involved in the town hall were anti-violence programs in schools, family stability, greater involvement from community leaders and mentorship programs, and increased education funding, particularly for students with learning difficulties.
There was occasional mention during the event of historic underfunding of neighborhoods, such as Brownsville and East New York, in Persaud’s district, particularly with regard to education. “Resources aren’t allocated the same way in our communities as in others,” said Dr. Gardere, who specializes in mental health.
Rabbi Hecht cited lower levels of screening tests for learning difficulties in schools in these underfunded communities as having a domino effect leading to disaffection and later serious consequences for local children. Early intervention is key, Hecht said.
Jackson, whose organization follows the Cure Violence model, said schoolchildren are “never too young” to learn about conflict resolution, adding, “It’s really about allowing our youth the safe space to ask questions,” about gun violence, gang activity, and other community issues. According to Jackson, “Conflict mediation needs to start as early as public school,” but “the programs in the schools are very scarce.”
However, there was an almost implicit agreement among participants that the city and state could not be relied upon to deliver much-needed local funding anytime soon. According to Persaud, “It’s not only about legislation. We’re never going to have enough funding.” She instead said that those in attendance “should all agree to work for the betterment of our community and we hope it will change the youth’s thinking.”
Several participants echoed a few points. Reverend Taylor was among those who stressed various versions of “It takes that entire village,” while expressing nostalgia for bygone days when community members shared collective responsibility for looking after each other’s children and the community knew the local beat cop.
Rev. Taylor says that “We don’t teach ourselves our worth,” which is “more than what [local youth] are settling for.” He voiced support for Senator Persaud’s bill that would add Black history to the public school curriculum. Echoing Senator Persaud, he said, “Sometimes we’re our own worst enemies.”
Riggins, among others, decried the “exit of Black fathers out of the household” as a key contributor to the current conditions in the district, although statistics show that Black fathers are no less likely to be absent from their children’s lives than other American fathers. Later, Jackson noted that in the local community, “The Cure Violence model is actually spearheaded by more men than women.”
Gardy Brazela, the 69th Precinct Council President and Brooklyn’s Community Board 18 chair, said that the rise in shootings was “directly related to gang violence,” adding “[gangs] do not care about your socioeconomic status or property value.” Like Rev. Taylor, Brazela believes that the community “must go back to taking the village approach to raising our children” and that “we’re lacking mentorship in our community.”
“Our young children are under a lot of pressure,” Brazela said, and he believes that adults “need to listen to what they have to say.”
When asked by Senator Persaud if the community has become desensitized to gun violence, Ariel Palmer, one of the Youth Explorers present, recounted how a shooting recently occured near her home and said, “It could be me or anybody that I know.”
***
by Andrew Millman, Gotham Gazette
@millman_andrew @GothamGazette
State Senators & election officials (photo: Senator Gianaris' office)
After the June primaries, when tens of thousands of absentee ballots were rejected on technical grounds or never cast because they were mailed to voters late or not at all, state lawmakers passed a series of measures aimed at correcting some of those mishaps. But several other bills introduced by legislators and pushed by voting rights advocates that could prevent thousands of ballots from being thrown out are still on the table as the clock ticks toward the general election.
Leading up to the June primary, Governor Andrew Cuomo signed a series of executive orders to change the rules around absentee voting in an effort to avoid crowded poll sites during a pandemic. The measures extended absentee voting eligibility to all registered voters, required absentee ballot applications be mailed to voters, and guaranteed postage for mail-in ballots.
The unprecedented leap in absentee voting led to a number of new problems for voters and elections administrators that ultimately disenfranchised voters, often without their knowledge. In New York City, 84,000 mail-in ballots were thrown out, frequently on technicalities like having a missing signature or a partially unsealed envelope. In response, state lawmakers introduced a series of bills to ensure more votes are counted, including several related to notifying voters when their ballots might be thrown out.
Some were passed and signed into law in August, but many others remain unmoved as the state's elections administrators brace themselves for a four-fold increase in voters this fall. The early voting period will run October 24 through November 1; Election Day is November 3. The New York State Board of Elections is anticipating 8 million voters including as many as 5 million mail-in ballots, in a state with 12.9 million registered voters.
Two of the signed bills codify key elements of Cuomo's primary executive order and guarantee another election with a significant portion of the electorate voting by mail. The first expands eligibility to vote absentee to the entire electorate during an epidemic or disease outbreak. The second allows voters to apply for an absentee ballot online through the New York State Board of Elections website. (There has been no legislation or executive order that would require local boards of elections to mail absentee ballot applications to all registered voters, as Cuomo mandated in the primaries.)
Others signed into law aim directly at problems that arose from the deluge of mailed ballots during the primaries.
Thousands of the absentee ballots were rejected in June because they arrived at boards of elections offices without a postmark, a problem that was completely outside voters' hands. A new law now requires election boards to count the ballots if they are time-stamped by the board by the day after Election Day, even if they are missing a postmark from the United State Postal Service (USPS).
Another bill seeks to work around the post office by requiring local boards to establish secure absentee ballot drop boxes. That bill is still in committee, but an executive order signed September 8, requires local boards to have drop boxes at early voting sites, Election Day poll sites, and their offices (in New York City, each borough office will have a drop box).
On the same day, Cuomo announced a campaign to raise awareness about the ways New Yorkers can vote, including early voting, an option watchdogs are saying should be more heavily encouraged to avoid the administrative stresses of absentee voting and long lines on Election Day.
As primary day approached in June, many voters still had not received the absentee ballot they had requested from the New York City Board of Elections (BOE). When he testified before state lawmakers in August, Michael Ryan, the executive director of the city BOE, said the absentee ballot application calendar did not grant enough flexibility in normal years and this year posed "an impossibility." A law signed later that month now allows voters to apply for absentee ballots prior to 30 days before an election, which is already giving local boards more time to process and fulfill requests.
A few days after he signed the August package, Cuomo signed an executive order that, among other things, requires local election boards to submit staffing plans and any staffing needs to the state by September 20, a measure to help ensure administrators can process the higher turnout.
Many of the ballots rejected this summer were tossed out because voters failed to sign their ballot envelopes.
One law signed in August would give absentee voters the opportunity to "cure" certain deficiencies on their ballots that would otherwise have them rejected -- namely lacking a signature, having a signature that doesn't match the one on the registration, or having an unsealed ballot envelope. Under the law, local boards of elections must notify voters within a day of detecting a defect and give them an opportunity to contest the rejection or correct the ballot. It extends the same type of due process right to absentee voters that in-person voters have when they sign an affidavit ballot at a poll site. A federal judge in Texas recently ruled a similar practice of rejecting ballots due to mismatched signatures there was unconstitutional.
Cuomo's August order requires the State Board of Elections to design a single "clarified envelope" for all local boards to use, which includes a large red 'X' where a signature is required.
Senator Zellnor Myrie, a Brooklyn Democrat, is chair of the Senate's elections committee and sponsor of several of the bills that passed, including the curing bill.
"Taking away someone's vote for a missing signature or an unsealed envelope really is the embodiment of disenfranchisement," Myrie said by phone Thursday.
"It's not the sexiest legislative highlight and victory but it really was, I believe, one of the most important election law bills we've passed both this year and last year, because of the implications of people knowing and having the opportunity to have their votes count," he said.
"Given the newness of the [mass absentee voting] experience, legislation that allows voters the opportunity to fix unintended, minor and often technical mistakes, is the right way to go," wrote Blair Horner, executive director of New York Public Interest Group (NYPIRG), the good government organization, in an email. "Far too many ballots were tossed in the June primary over ridiculously technical challenges."
But several other common mistakes are addressed in legislation that has yet to pass, but could lead to thousands more ballots being counted, their sponsors say.
One bill would extend the same notice and opportunity to cure ballots when they are received partially opened, or closed with glue, tape, or another re-sealing agent. In these cases, the legislation would give recourse to voters to attest that they sent their ballot in the condition it was received in. The bill is still in committee.
A second bill would require absentee ballots to be counted as long as the voter's intent is "unambiguous," even if there are other markings on the ballot.
"It is so easy with a marker to make a mark. What if it's food? I mean, everybody is doing absentee ballots at home, right?" said Assemblymember Amy Paulin, a Westchester Democrat who sponsors the two bills along with Myrie, in a phone interview.
"You don't want any stray marks of any sort when the intent of the voter is clear to eliminate the vote from being counted. And right now it can be challenged," she said.
Myrie and Paulin are not sure whether their bills will pass in time to impact the general election and it is unclear whether the two chambers of the State Legislature will meet in session to pass any legislation before voters go to the polls (or the mailbox).
"We have no idea whether we're going back to session prior to the election," Paulin told Gotham Gazette. "Certainly if we are I'm going to be pushing [the bills] and if we're not then they're still worth doing."
Lawmakers will have to act especially quickly if they are going to pass another proposal that would make it easier to register to vote in time to enfranchise more eligible New Yorkers by this fall’s vote, which includes the presidential election, among many others for Congress, the State Legislature, and more. The bill, which would create online voter registration in New York City through the city's Campaign Finance Board, has passed in the Senate but not the Assembly.
The online registration bill has passed in the Senate but not the Assembly, while automatic voter registration has passed both houses but has not been sent to the governor (or been requested by him) for signing.
"I can't say with certainty when we'll meet again but I do know that if it's the case that we have to move swiftly -- and this is to help safeguard our democracy, particularly in light of the rhetoric that is coming out of the federal administration -- I think that the [Senate] majority has shown that we're ready to take those steps and I expect that we will do the same in this instance," Myrie said.
There isn't much time before the October 9 deadline to register to vote in the general election.
Voting advocates and some lawmakers also want to see the state pay for postage on absentee ballots, as it did during the primaries, but the proposal appears unlikely to move without another round of federal stimulus funding. Between federal and state allocations, New York's elections administrators had an additional $24 million to run elections this year, which has largely dried up, according to State Board of Elections officials. About 40 percent of the 1.8 million voters in the primaries across the state cast an absentee ballot. With 8 million voters expected in the general election, the proposal would likely require the state to pay postage on millions of envelopes.
In response to inquiries about whether the governor planned to issue more executive orders to provide for postage, curing certain ballot errors, and other measures proposed by legislators and advocates, Freeman Klopott, a spokesperson for the state Division of the Budget, wrote, "The State is providing unprecedented access to the ballot box and just last week the Governor announced a public service campaign to raise awareness that voters now have three options to cast their ballot: early voting, voting absentee, or voting in person on Election Day." He added that the executive order establishing absentee drop boxes has the effect of "negating the need to mail a ballot at all."
"The boards of elections have millions of dollars available to them from previously provided funding from the State and Federal governments and they should make use of those resources as the State is contending with a $62 billion revenue drop over four years," he added.
"In the absence of Federal funding to offset this revenue loss, the State, which funds schools, hospitals, and public safety, will have to make spending reductions, and anywhere we don’t reduce spending will mean deeper reductions elsewhere," he wrote. "This is another reason the Federal government must step up and provide States with necessary resources."
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by Ethan Geringer-Sameth, reporter, Gotham Gazette
@GeringerSameth @GothamGazette
Queens Assembly candidate Khaleel Anderson (photo: @KhaleelAnderson)
A younger generation of Democratic political candidates — which has grown up amid the Great Recession, growing inequality, rising costs of higher education and massive student loan debt, the ticking time-bomb that is climate change, and other crises including, now, the coronavirus pandemic and its fallout — has been offering ambitious policy goals and great urgency around achieving them, resonating with voters and finding success in their runs for office.
In recent election cycles, New York has seen many younger candidates win their bids for state legislative and congressional seats, one facet of the Democratic Party’s internal reckoning that shows an ascendant left wing in part led by a new generation of activists and candidates.
Some, but not all, of these candidates are democratic socialists, a far left brand of politics with a young base, as shown by support for U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders, the septuagenarian figurehead of the progressive movement in America, who won 65% of New York voters aged 18-29 in his 2016 Democratic primary contest against former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who won every other age group, according to CNN exit polling data. And although the movement has not found victory through either of Sanders’ two presidential bids, down-ballot races have told a different story.
And that story is of a generational shift underway in New York politics, with major potential implications for public policy coming out of the state capital in Albany, not to mention other power centers like New York City Hall and borough-based Democratic Party organizations. It is also already manifesting itself in the state’s and city’s representation in Congress and impact on the national stage.
The recent trend of New York electing both younger and further left candidates kicked off with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s June 2018 primary victory over then-Rep. Joe Crowley, with the then-28-year-old democratic socialist shocking the world and immediately becoming a national standard-bearer for those of her generation and politics.
Then came September 2018 victories of now-State Senators Alessandra Biaggi, Jessica Ramos, Zellnor Myrie, and Julia Salazar, all in their twenties or thirties when elected as progressive insurgents against more moderate, older incumbent Democrats. All went on to easily win their general elections, as is the norm in almost every New York City electoral district given Democrats’ heavy voter enrollment advantage. In a Brooklyn swing district, Democrat Andrew Gounardes, then-33, beat Republican Martin Golden, then-68, helping the Democrats win back a State Senate majority and advance a long list of priorities.
Then came 2020, and a combined state and congressional (and presidential) June primary day amid a pandemic and massive resultant socio-economic crisis.
Younger, left-leaning candidates, often supported by many progressive groups and individuals, won a long list of Democratic primary victories. They ran on policies that, in sum, included single-payer health care, more urgent efforts to combat climate change and foster a “just transition” to a green economy, free public college, greater tenant protections, higher taxes on the wealthy, homes and jobs guarantees, more education funding, marijuana legalization, decriminalization of sex work, and, during the pandemic, rent cancellation.
The winning candidates included Khaleel Anderson, 24 years old; Zohran Mamdani, 28; Phara Souffrant Forrest, 31; Emily Gallagher, 36; and Jenifer Rajkumar, 38, all of whom won primaries for the State Assembly, along with Jabari Brisport, 33, who won a State Senate primary; and Ritchie Torres, 32, and Mondaire Jones, 33, who won Congressional races. Jamaal Bowman, 44, also won offering generational change and far-left ideology in his challenge to 73-year-old incumbent Rep. Eliot Engel, and other Assembly candidates in their forties, Jessica Gonzalez-Rojas and Marcela Mitaynes, beat incumbent Democrats while offering a far-left message.
Souffrant Forrest, Mamdani, and Brisport were all endorsed by New York City’s branch of the Democratic Socialists of America, an organization that also backed Salazar and Ocasio-Cortez in 2018 and 2020, and had six of its seven endorsed candidates win this election cycle (DSA-backed Samelys Lopez lost to Torres in the 15th Congressional District primary).
Growing dissatisfaction with government and social conditions is something Torres, one of the youngest people elected to the City Council in modern times and likely to soon be one of the youngest elected to Congress, says has contributed to the success of younger elected officials, who are often those challenging incumbents.
“We’re living in an anti-establishment moment. When the electorate has a bias for youth and energy. I think if you have a young insurgent running against an established politician who’s been entrenched in office for decades, the young insurgent has a greater advantage now more than ever,” Torres said. “At a time of peak suffering, the argument for insurgents might be helped because if you have been entrenched in office for decades, and your district is in the same position that it was when you first entered public office, does your tons of experience really matter?”
Brisport, who is further to the left of Torres, nonetheless voiced a similar sentiment and said the reason for more young people challenging incumbents is their want for bigger changes.
“It is predominantly younger people that are unseating incumbents, are making up this new guard and I think that speaks to a hunger and a thirst for much bolder progressive policies throughout New York,” said Brisport, currently a middle-school teacher and of central Brooklyn, in an interview. “My generation, millennials and below us, Gen-Z, we are seeing firsthand capitalism really unfurling on itself, runaway income inequality, a world where we don’t see ourselves as eventual homeowners in the way our parents did, our American dream is no longer to get a house and 2.5 kids the dream is just to survive this nightmare, this hellscape of capitalism that we live in where rents are spiraling out of control, health care — you’re lucky if you have it and if you don’t you’re confined to a lifetime of medical debt — and if you’re Black, indigenous, person of color, you might just get shot by police for the crime of existing. It’s a confluence of factors that is extremely terrifying for people in my generation and revolutionary politics is much more alluring in a scenario like that.”
Some of those more progressive policies have seen more support from young people: a 2019 Quinnipiac University poll found that New York State residents aged 18-34 were the biggest supporters of congestion pricing (at 62% in favor), stricter gun laws (70%), legalizing marijuana (84%), and protecting abortion rights (80%).
And, although only 36% approved of single-payer health-care generally, if it were to decrease health care costs (even at the cost of raising taxes), they were the biggest supporters of single-payer health-care, too, at 57%. Younger people are more open than older generations to raising taxes if it means reducing individual health-care costs. Nationally, a poll conducted last year by the Institute of Politics (IOP) at Harvard Kennedy School found that 51% of those aged 18-29 support free public college for those from families making $125,000 a year or less and free community college for all — even if it costs $47 billion a year.
“I’ve seen multiple recessions, I’ve seen, in many ways, the failures of capitalism again and again and again kind of replayed ad nauseum,” said Mamdani, currently a housing counselor and of western Queens, in an interview. “There is a real fear with regards to health-care and with regards to debt, specifically student loan debt. We have seen, in many ways, much of capitalism’s promises, we have seen the terms and conditions of those promises in our lifetime. And generations older than us, there have been more of the promises delivered to them, while for us that promise has been extinguished and now it’s all of the fine print.”
Attaining higher education and employment are two interwoven issues for young people: higher education costs are rising (by over 25% in the last decade, according to a CNBC analysis of The College Board data), while a college degree is becoming more and more essential to find employment (as a 2014 report from Burning Glass, a labor market analytics company, shows). And most recently, during the coronavirus pandemic, young New Yorkers were most affected when it comes to losing employment — unemployment of those aged 16-24 skyrocketed from 6.6% to 35.2% from February to May, according to a report by New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer. For the city writ large, it had gone from 3.5% to 19.9%.
Anderson, currently a supplemental instructor at his alma mater, Queens College, and likely to be the youngest member of the state Legislature next year, noted that many struggles young people face — from affording higher education to getting a job to paying for rent — contribute to one another.
“Young people, we’ve got to focus on ensuring that we can have a future,” Anderson, of southeast Queens, said in an interview. “Whether it was succumbing to gun violence, whether it was succumbing to student debt, whether it was not being able to afford health-care, whether it’s living in the Rockaways in the Rosedale section of the district and facing constant flooding, these are the things that young people are genuinely concerned about and that’s how my politics will be guided.”
Anderson, who got started in politics as an organizer with the Rockaway Youth Task Force, went on to explain that he believes young people are at the center of many different issues, from being the most common perpetrators and victims of gun violence, to being those disserved by failing school systems, to being unable to afford housing, sometimes due to student debt.
“We’re at the epicenter of everything and until someone comes in like myself and other young leaders who will come behind me, comes in and understands the youth perspective and how we need to continue to invest in youth so that all of that trickles down and translates to everyone else, you will continue to see these problems perpetuate,” Anderson said.
Tenants’ rights, specifically, have been a cause many younger people are rallying around, according to Cea Weaver, a longtime housing activist who helped push stronger rent regulations through the Legislature last year and is the campaign coordinator of the Housing Justice for All coalition.
“New York’s a majority-renter city and it always has been,” said Weaver, who is 31. “So, I think, when you’re talking about New York City, I think it’s been a little bit surprising just how few elected officials have really centered renters’ rights. But I think as people become more active and as the housing market is more and more out of control, I think we’re just seeing a whole generation of younger electeds who are responding to a younger tenants movement.”
Many of the younger state candidates elected in 2018 — particularly Myrie, Biaggi, Ramos, and Salazar — ran on platforms centering tenants’ rights and in opposition to big real estate interests, including promises not to accept donations from developers. Housing was a key issue they had to distinguish themselves from their incumbent opponents, who were generously supported by the real estate industry.
Since then, many more candidates — incumbents and insurgents alike — have taken pledges not to accept real estate donations, and in 2019 historic legislation was passed by the State Legislature and signed by Governor Cuomo to increase protections for millions of rent-regulated tenants.
And it’s an issue that was at the center of many of the recent primaries, such as in Gallagher’s race against incumbent Joe Lentol, where her support of canceling rent contrasted with Lentol’s work in passing a more moderate rent voucher bill, and in Mamdani’s, where he highlighted his opponent breaking her pledge not to accept real estate donations.
Canceling rent is one policy challengers like Gallagher, who sometimes shared similar platforms with their also-progressive opponents, distinguished themselves. While many current Assembly members, like Lentol, dismissed the policy as unrealistic and having the potential to hurt small landlords, Gallagher argued it was essential to help those facing extreme financial insecurity due to the pandemic and who could not pay their rent (the bill in the Legislature would not cancel rent for those who could afford to pay and would provide relief for smaller landlords).
“A lot of these voters, they identify with someone who has student debt, or hasn’t lived in the community as long or hasn’t been paying rent themselves as long in the community and therefore are paying a higher part of their income to live on,” said Jerry Skurnik, a long-time political consultant at Prime New York and former aide to Mayor Ed Koch, in an interview. “I can’t prove it but I’m assuming Joe Lentol, because he lived in his community for 70 years, probably was paying less rent per square foot than Emily Gallagher did, not that he did anything unfair by doing that.”
Like other challengers discussing their own challenges with bills and burdens, Gallagher used her experiences struggling to afford rent to connect to voters during her campaign, and had previously said that, were she not in a rent-stabilized apartment, she likely would not have been able to live in the northern Brooklyn district, which has been home to massive development and accelerated gentrification over the past decade-plus.
“For something of this magnitude, for the times we’re living in,” said Brisport, an extreme measure like canceling rent “is fine, and it should be expected to think completely outside of the box. What’s the alternative, you’re just going to evict a million people? How is that not worse? From a moral standpoint, yes. From a public health standpoint, for the economy, everything, it would actually be more disruptive to have hundreds of thousands, over a million evictions happen in New York than to cancel rent and then have a small fund for landlords.”
Gallagher and Briport, among other younger progressive candidates, held out their personal experiences as renters in New York City in connecting with voters and activists who are passionate about tenants’ rights, according to Weaver.
“A lot of the people who are the young folks in elected office right now are also rent-stabilized tenants,” Weaver said. “Every single candidate is taking the housing crisis much more seriously than their predecessors…We have younger folks who are willing to think creatively about what a solution would look like in this movement and who don’t have decades of housing policy telling them that the most important thing is to bail out the real estate industry.”
But some see defeating older, experienced Assembly members, like Joe Lentol, as a huge loss to the community. Bob Liff, Senior Vice President of George Arzt Communications, said although he has nothing against newcomers like Gallagher, Lentol and others provide a lot of value due to their experience and the connections they build over time.
“What you’re losing is an awful lot of institutional memory,” Liff said in an interview. “And when you’re at a certain age and you think that you are inherently soiled by your experience, well that’s all well and good, until you realize you don’t know where the bodies are buried. These people do because they buried them.”
Liff — who through his firm is a spokesperson for the Brooklyn Democratic Party but was speaking only for himself, he stressed — criticized some younger candidates, especially those in the Democratic Socialists of America, for being seemingly unwilling to acknowledge valid points against them or their policies, such as the fact that the organization does tend to perform best in gentrified areas, and that some of their candidates come from wealthy backgrounds while offering their working-class messaging.
“I’m hopeful, I just think that as you mature hopefully you understand that you need more allies, and that the way that you get more allies is not to trim your sails but to respect the idea that other people might have different views and you might have to work with them. I mean, God forbid, settle for half a loaf,” Liff said, referencing his belief in the necessity to find compromise to achieve meaningful legislation. “It’s an argument for the idea that this country changes in an evolutionary rather than in a revolutionary way. But you can’t tell me that we’re not better off than we were in the 1950s.”
Liff mentioned Ocasio-Cortez as someone he believes has done a great job fighting for her policy goals while also working with her colleagues in Congress.
Brooke Smith, 39, is student body president at CUNY’s Medgar Evers College and a supporter of Anderson. When living in the Rockaways years ago, she saw Anderson volunteering in front of the supermarket, getting signatures for the state senator at the time. Two years later they met again on a bus for a CUNY advocacy trip, and by the end of the day he had shared with her his plan to run for office, and moved her and her husband to donate to him. That donation allowed Anderson to reach the minimum required for him to open his campaign account.
As someone who is not technically a millennial but has worked with many young people pushing for a tuition freeze and free CUNY education, among other things, as a student representative, Smith has a unique perspective on the younger generation, and said she sees a sense of entitlement Liff described as a negative in a more positive light.
“What I’ve noticed is that the younger generation, they’re a lot more radical than the two generations above them,” said Smith, who has also been an advocate for families who have stillbirths after losing her daughter in 2014. After the more radical civil rights era, subsequent generations were more hesitant to seek significant change and reform, she said, until now. “They’re kind of experiencing all the privilege that they should. Not really feeling different. They feel entitled to certain things because they do feel worthy, that they belong here, that they deserve the same treatment, things of that nature. So now, as they start to actually see some of the things that some of these other generations were talking about, they have become more radical because they feel more empowered because of the entitlement that was given to them from several generations down. So, I actually think it’s a beautiful thing because it’s causing a whole different level of change.”
Smith also feels the lack of government experience candidates like Anderson have can also be a plus, as it means they are not as invested in the status quo, echoing a similar sentiment Weaver made regarding old guard politicians’ approach to housing policy.
“That sense of entitlement is going to push them to not really fall into the culture that much,” Smith said. “They’re so radical that I feel like there’s a fearlessness, so I expect to see [Anderson] be able to stand up and bring up to the table that most people are afraid to mention because of their colleagues, because of the things that they have to go back-and-forth with each other, because he’s not coming from that culture.”
Torres similarly said that insurgents' lack of political experience and work on the outside of government is becoming more and more of an advantage, and less of a disadvantage, in these races. A liberal who does not identify as a democratic socialist and has in fact been very critical of the DSA while agreeing on several issues, Torres’ primary win in the Bronx resulted in the DSA’s only local loss of this election cycle. He sees the recent success of younger candidates generally as a sign that people want change, and as many of them are activists, that they want someone used to challenging those in government.
“Young elected officials tend to function as advocates rather than as insiders,” Torres said in an interview. “I think the greatest change is that politics is going to become as much about the outside game as it is about the inside game.”
He said he is part of a generation that “has been failed by the government,” and referenced the rising costs of housing, healthcare, and higher education. Growing up in public housing himself, he said he felt abandoned by the federal government — one of the reasons he recently ran for Congress, which historically has played a greater role in the funding of public housing. After beating the Bronx Democrtic Party’s chosen candidate in his 2013 primary win, Torres has had an independent streak during his Council tenure, and been one of the most vocal critics of Mayor Bill de Blasio, a fellow Democrat.
Torres noted that the only wholly consistent characteristic of the successful insurgents mentioned is their younger ages, suggesting that voters are looking at more than just the policies candidates support.
“Voters are not so much voting for a particular ideology, they’re largely voting for change,” Torres said. “For a new generation of leadership. Because even among the elected officials there are considerable ideological differences.”
Liff and Skurnik both mentioned that, similarly, discontent during the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s and 1970s led to a movement of young insurgents running against the establishment and for change. Skurnik said Democratic Congressional Rep. Eliot Engel, who recently lost his seat after being outflanked from the left and outworked by Bowman, the democratic socialist former middle school principal, got his start in politics during this time as an anti-war politician. Engel was first elected to the State Assembly in 1977, when he was 30 years old. Lentol also entered office at the age of 30, in 1973, and was often seen as one of the major progressive leaders in the state, especially when it came to criminal justice reform.
“That would be unfair to the incumbents who do grow and do embrace these issues,” Liff said, mentioning how although Lentol was originally for the death penalty, he ended up playing a pivotal role in ending it in New York State. “And the reason there’s been progress on these issues is because they have, in fact, understood the political forces, the fairness, the justice, the inequality issues.”
Similar to those who were motivated to join politics during the Vietnam War, or after Watergate, Skurnik said the election of President Donald Trump in 2016 had a similar effect.
“I would say more Trump than anything else. Trump energized people, generally progressive people, to get more involved and pay more attention,” Skurnik said.
One policy area Trump has motivated movement on is climate change, as he has denied it is happening, called it a “hoax,” took America out of the Paris Climate Agreement, and appointed officials to top posts who have rolled back environmental regulations.
The New York City Sunrise Movement, a youth-led advocacy group focused on electing politicians who recognize the dangers of climate change and support legislation such as The Green New Deal, has had significant success in New York, including by putting major resources to help elect Bowman.
“Trump is a caricature of what was already wrong with American politics, and so I think that he has kind of exaggerated everything that was already going wrong and made it painfully obvious to everyone so that you could no longer possible ignore it,” said Grace Cuddihy, a 16-year-old member of the group.
The NYC Sunrise Movement itself was founded in 2018 and has made substantial efforts to support politicians that oppose Trump’s policies. In New York, they have helped to get many of their endorsed candidates into office, including Mamdani, Brisport, Souffrant Forrest, and other insurgents who won in 2020, as well as some in 2018, including Ocasio-Cortez, Biaggi, and Myrie. Fourteen of their 16 endorsed candidates won this year, many of them younger progressives.
Cuddihy said the organization made 60,000 calls for its endorsed candidates, and its national branch — which she is also a part of — made hundreds of thousands of calls just for Bowman.
“It really is my future and my life and because I am so young — they say we have nine years left, I’m going to be 25,” Cuddihy said, referencing some of the most disastrous projected impending consequences of climate change. “As someone who can’t vote…watching democracy deteriorate before my eyes and not being able to go to the voting booth and do something about it has motivated me to be more active in terms of phone-banking and volunteering for candidates and organizing for political leaders.”
And although the Green New Deal championed by Ocasio-Cortez and many other but not all New York representatives has not gained as much traction in Congress as activists would like, New York has passed significant climate change and green economy legislation that included investments in renewable energy and enacted goals to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050 and 100% clean power by 2040.
But candidates such as Brisport and Mamdani want more ambitious climate policies, such as making energy a public utility and having New York divest pension funds from fossil fuels (something being pursued to an extent at the city level but not at the state level).
“The threat is right here, it’s already here, it’s happening and the urgency is so right there for my generation that the notion of strong redistributive policies, shifting billions of dollars from the wealthiest people into fighting climate change isn’t some laughable idea, it’s a necessary thing to do,” said Brisport.
While younger and more progressive voters recently helped elect candidates with ambitious left-wing agendas, such as Brisport, it is yet to be seen what the impact will be on the legislative bodies they are entering. When a wave of progressives like Myrie, Biaggi, Ramos, Salazar, and Gounardes helped Democrats to win back the State Senate in 2018, it resulted in sweeping legislation at the state level — although some of the most ambitious far left policy goals were left on the back burner, forming the platforms of some of this year’s insurgent left-wing candidates.
Skurnik thinks a similar thing will happen in 2021, as incoming members will push the state farther left, but not all the way, with policies such as those focused on tenants’ rights.
“They will move more incumbents, the establishment people, to a more progressive position. Maybe not as far as they say they want to go,” Skurnik said. “I don’t think they’re gonna cancel rent, but I think they will do other things for tenants that, three or four years ago, weren’t even on the horizon.”
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by Victor Porcelli, Gotham Gazette
@GothamGazette
Note: this article has been corrected to note that NYC Sunrise did endorse Ocasio-Cortez in the 2018 Democratic primary.
Coronavirus testing (photo: Michael Appleton/Mayoral Photography Office)
As coronavirus cases continue to spike across the country, Governor Andrew Cuomo has touted 38 days straight in New York with a statewide covid-positivity rate below 1 percent. The metrics hold center stage in conversations about reopening New York City's schools and dining rooms, two of the biggest and most uncertain next frontiers in the region's socioeconomic restart.
"Testing is a cornerstone of our efforts to keep New Yorkers safe from COVID-19,” the governor said in a statement Saturday, the 36th day of positivity rates registering under one percent. “The more testing you do, the more accurate a picture of the virus' spread you have.”
But New York State and City coronavirus testing doesn't paint a complete picture of the infection rate across the population, only the infection rate among people who choose to get tested. Access and the decision to be tested depend on a number of factors that could bias the results and bely the true reach of COVID-19, a largely unspoken reality with implications not only for reopening plans but also for how precious resources are allocated and care provided in communities coping with the pandemic. The current mass testing regime, which included an average of roughly 30,000 tests per day during the first week of September, has still been showing hundreds of new covid-positive cases in New York City each day.
In the spring, while contending with a largely absentee federal government, it took public health officials months to roll out COVID-19 and antibody testing for the general population in New York City, initially providing it only for people who met a narrow set of criteria -- like having recently visited China and showed symptoms -- later expanding it to certain frontline workers and at-risk populations, and then to people who may have been exposed and people who protested in public, until June 1 when Mayor Bill de Blasio began encouraging all New Yorkers to get tested. Even after testing was opened to all, the placement of temporary testing sites and existing labs targeted certain populations.
The city's and state's reported positivity rates are currently a percentage of those who self-select to be tested. The rates, which have been a staple of Cuomo’s and de Blasio's daily updates since the state of emergency began in March, have been key to helping public health officials map the contours of the virus outbreak and measure their approach to mitigating it.
Under Cuomo's indoor dining plan, the latest major reopening announcement, the state's covid-positivity rate in October and early November will determine whether he will allow New York City restaurants to expand from 25 percent to 50 percent indoor capacity. De Blasio said the city, itself, would revisit the plan if the positivity rate hits 2 percent. Other reopening plans, like for in-person schooling, also depend on positivity thresholds.
But the metric officials are using, while improving regularly with the growing number of daily tests, is subject to biases based on who has the means to be tested and who decides to get one. People who are unable to get to a testing facility, either because of work, child- or elder-care responsibilities, or because of a disability, will be underrepresented in positivity rates. So will people who are asymptomatic, those disinclined to expose themselves at a medical center or testing facility, or people who are misinformed about who should get tested, especially due to language barriers or living in communities where lines of engagement with the government are corroded. Testing in a number of places throughout the state is done at a drive-through and requires a car.
All of these factors are likely to lead to gaps in the data falling along racial and ethnic lines. New York City continues to see higher positivity rates in lower-income areas and communities of color, rates that on their own would trigger an indoor dining or school shutdown, but are pulled down in the citywide data by lower, less alarming rates elsewhere.
Epidemiologists warn that misunderstanding the level of undocumented COVID-19 cases within a particular community could drive up rates of illness and death.
"There is going to likely be all manner of different racial and ethnic disparities that are going to go on with this, which is only contributing to what is already a larger, what I call, 'syndemic,'" said Dr. Charles Branas, chair of the Department of Epidemiology at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health, over the phone in August, referring to the dovetailing plagues of COVID-19 and racial inequality.
But there is another testing method -- the random survey -- that has fewer of the built-in biases of self-selection, and members of the scientific community are wondering why it isn't being discussed.
Self-selected testing "means we have data in hand and decisions can be made with it. And there is nothing wrong with that," Branas said. "But I do think we need to fully embrace the potential bias and the direction of that bias that these data are posing."
"My concern is I don't hear that from public health officials, from leadership. I hear them giving cutoffs for test positivity and for incidence rates that are without concern for the biases of the data that are going into them. I think we need to perhaps think about that a little more," Branas said.
The city's school reopening plan -- in which hundreds of thousands of students are currently slated to return to classrooms -- hinges on the city's COVID-19 transmission rate remaining below 3 percent. In June, after initially resisting demands by teachers' unions for more robust testing, de Blasio said the reopening would also include randomized testing of between 10 and 20 percent of people entering school buildings.
One of the primary challenges of city and state officials over the last six months has been rapidly scaling up COVID-19 testing capacity, not only to catch and treat cases, but to get a more accurate glimpse of what they are up against and where hotspots may be.
That degree of accuracy depends on the testing methodology. Limited, self-selected testing like what New York City was doing in the early days of the outbreak, while important for individual diagnoses, is the least accurate for predicting a virus' total spread, especially one where so many carriers are believed to be asymptomatic. A policy of opening self-selected testing to the entire population is far more likely to produce meaningful results because the sample size is larger and more diverse. A complete census -- in which every member of the population is tested, as has been the case in a few jurisdictions throughout the world -- is the most total view.
Randomized testing, like random polls, is a way to estimate the virus' total spread by extrapolating a representative subset of the population into a model of the entire population.
Short of a full census, random sampling "is the best way to estimate what the general population is doing," according to Branas. "This is a denominator problem of who falls into that general denominator that's driving test positivity rate. And it's of concern."
"It's why we do it in elections, for instance,” he continued. “If we want to figure out who is going to win an election, we don't go asking our friends who they are going to vote for, or friends of friends. That's like an internet poll...That's completely biased.”
No major city in the country has used randomized testing to map the novel coronavirus.
Public health officials in New York have taken a reactive, rather than predictive, approach to coronavirus testing. The state and city have each employed "SWAT" or "hyperlocal" contact-tracing deployments to areas experiencing an uptick in cases to slow the spread. In May, the state partnered with Northwell Health to set up temporary testing sites at churches in low-income neighborhoods and communities of color, which had been most devastated by the pandemic.
City and State public health officials have confirmed that, besides testing city public school students, there is no randomized testing taking place or planned, and thus no way of presenting a true picture of COVID-19's prevalence in society, including those who don't get tested.
"The true underlying infection rate will vary across different populations residing in different geographic areas of the state," wrote Jonah Bruno, a spokesperson for the state Department of Health, in an email to Gotham Gazette. "Serosurveys detect the presence of antibody at a specific point in time in the population of individuals tested."
"We are not currently conducting any random testing surveys," Bruno wrote late last month.
The city is currently conducting a random telephone survey asking people about any symptoms they may have, officials say, but it does not capture the vast majority of infected people who are asymptomatic. "This allows us to estimate how many people had COVID-19 including those who didn’t get tested or seek healthcare," wrote Stephanie Buhle, then-spokesperson for the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, in an email in August.
"This telephone survey, however, cannot capture the number of people who had asymptomatic infections," she wrote, adding that the results would be available later this fall.
The city is also working on a randomized antibody survey that would "reflect the general population of NYC." The survey results, which are expected later this year, will provide better information on the number of people who were at some point infected -- with or without symptoms -- but they cannot provide a snapshot of the virus' reach at any given time.
Epidemiologists say that to be effective the random surveys would have to be conducted frequently.
"You want to document the course of the undocumented cases and that will change. You can do one and then you would wait a month and things might alter dramatically and you wouldn't know," Branas said.
Frequent randomized testing could be costly and logistically challenging. The randomized testing in New York City schools, for example, where between 60,000 and 120,000 students and staff could be tested per month, will cost the city between $70 to $90 per test through a company called Fulgent Genetics, which the city hired to conduct the testing. Random testing also means the public has to buy in, which can require teams of researchers skilled enough to convince people to take the test.
Shortly after the school testing plan announcement, a group of Republican elected officials from Staten Island criticized the randomized testing component by framing it as a matter of government overreach and violation of parental rights.
"That a parent must consent to their child being medically tested at random by the DOE or be barred from entering in-person public school programs is an astounding stretch of authority. The Chancellor is not our doctor and the unions do not represent my son," wrote Council Member Joseph Borelli in a statement on September 2.
A week later, Borelli and Council Member Steven Matteo, and Assemblymembers Nicole Malliotakis and Michael Reilly, sent a petition to Mayor de Blasio with more than 1,400 Staten Island public school parents "opposing the mandatory in-school testing random testing for COVID-19."
One of the greatest challenges from an experimental standpoint is how to identify a truly random sampling of the population.
"I think the logistics of doing it are a nightmare and there are just not enough resources," said Dr. Karla Ballman, Chief of Biostatistics and Epidemiology at Weill Cornell Medical College in Manhattan. "It's not so much the availability of the tests...how are you going to randomly pick people, that's a big problem. And then another big problem is, are they going to come in to be tested? We're having a hard enough time getting people to wear masks."
"It takes a lot of resources, and I don't think anyone has those resources at hand," she added.
Dr. Bill Hanage, an epidemiologist at Harvard's T.H. Chan School of Public Health, believes there are innovative ways of conducting random COVID-19 surveys that aren't being explored on a wide basis. One of them is testing for the novel coronavirus' signature RNA in the sewers, which researchers in Boston have done. "You can find it, and you can actually estimate how many copies of it in a given volume of sewage," he told Gotham Gazette. The method would give scientists a true random sample and could be repeated frequently. But testing for COVID-19 in people's excrement can give a less reliable signal: "Wastewater jumps around like crazy. It's very, very, very variable," he said.
Dr. Anna Bershteyn, who teaches in the Department of Population Health at NYU Grossman School of Medicine, has been working with mathematical models to identify the best testing approaches for beating back the pandemic. She believes a combination of rapid contact tracing and randomized testing could be effective in suppressing the virus by letting swaths of the population know they are potentially infectious and using contact tracers to pinpoint individuals who may have been directly exposed. "You would need an enormous amount of testing, on the order of a million everyday," for random testing to be effective in this way, she said, based on recent modelling.
Other epidemiologists Gotham Gazette spoke with said a randomized test could be done with test samples ordering in the thousands.
Branas believes the logistical challenges to city-wide random testing aren't necessarily prohibitive because many of the functions already exist within the city's test and trace corps. "Perhaps the most effective way to do this, and folks should have thought this out, is to go door to door," he said. The process would be akin to contract tracing, he said, "except contact tracing is not a random sample, you're following the contacts of a specific individual. But...the resource costs can be similar to something like that, it's just you're going to random places to do it."
The election is an instructive comparison. "We mount a regular stream of random sample surveys to determine how our candidates are doing,” he said. “If we can do it for the election we should be able to come up with a reasonable way to do it here.”
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by Ethan Geringer-Sameth, reporter, Gotham Gazette
@GeringerSameth @GothamGazette
New NYPD officers are sworn in (photo: Michael Appleton/Mayor's Office)
In the wake of the killing of George Floyd and other Black Americans at the hands of law enforcement, the Qualified Immunity Doctrine has come under increased scrutiny from activists and elected officials. Simply put, when applied to police officers, qualified immunity means that officers can rarely be subject to civil lawsuits in their individual capacities over allegations of excessive force, brutality, or other misconduct while on the job. In other words, they have a certain immunity to such legal responsibility based on the jobs they have, the justification for which is level of danger and necessity of quick decision-making in their jobs.
Nationally, the Democratic-controlled U.S. House of Representatives recently passed the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, which would restrict the use of qualified immunity for state and local officers by changing the standard from “willfully” to “knowingly or with reckless disregard,” among other reforms. The measure passed on a party-line vote in the House and is not expected to be taken up by the Republican-controlled Senate, while President Trump has indicated opposition to the measure.
In New York, State Senator Zellnor Myrie, a Brooklyn Democrat, announced plans in late June to introduce a bill that would curb qualified immunity in the state by ending it for police officers. The announcement followed the passage of a series of police reforms by the Legislature and signed into law by Governor Andrew Cuomo during the initial Black Lives Matter protests in the wake of George Floyd’s killing, most of which were long-standing pieces of legislation.
Citing harm inflicted by police officers particularly upon Black and brown people, Myrie said in announcing the legislation, “In the absence of federal action, it is important for New York to step up and show the public that when police officers violate an individual’s rights, we will hold them accountable for their misconduct.”
The goal, Myrie said, is “to prevent the misconduct in the first place.” He noted that “Both liberal and conservative legal experts have agreed that this doctrine is antiquated and unfair.”
On September 3, New York Law School (NYLS) continued the discussion, with a panel discussion hosted by the school’s Impact Center for Public Interest Law called “Qualified Immunity and Police Officers: A Candid Discussion on Doctrine’s Future.” The conversation was moderated by Susan Abraham, a NYLS professor, and included Kirk Burkhalter, a NYLS professor and retired NYPD detective; Alvin Bragg, former Chief Deputy Attorney General of New York State and now a NYLS visiting professor and candidate in the 2021 Manhattan District Attorney Democratic primary; Edward Purcell, a Distinguished Professor at NYLS; and Jason Williamson, Deputy Director of the ACLU's Criminal Law Reform Project.
Anthony Crowell, the NYLS Dean, opened the event by noting “There’s been a real shift in how these issues are considered and addressed in our culture and our politics, but more needs to be done,” and that “The doctrine of qualified immunity is a deeply-polarizing topic.”
“It’s important to focus on genuine issues that impact policing and community relations,” said Crowell, who served as a Counselor to Mayor Michael Bloomberg for over a decade.
In beginning the discussion, Abraham noted that about a thousand people had joined the event, which was held over Zoom, most of whom were lawyers there for bar-mandated Continuing Legal Education (CLE).
Purcell started the discussion by presenting a history of the Qualified Immunity Doctrine and how its application has evolved over time. Under federal law (42 U.S.C. § 1983), a person can sue for damages when state or federal officials violate their rights. However, since 1951, federal courts have determined that a level of immunity exists for certain government individuals. Professor Purcell asserted that these immunities were “judge-made law.”
For example, members of Congress members and Presidents of the United States have “absolute immunity,” which prevents them from being subject to lawsuits for carrying out their official functions. This does not mean that the institutions cannot be held liable, but simply that the individuals who occupy those positions cannot be held personally liable for actions taken while performing their duties.
Other government officials, such as police officers, have been determined to hold something called “qualified immunity,” which means that they are protected from liability if the official believed in good faith that their actions were lawful and that the conduct was objectively reasonable.
In Pierson v. Ray (1967), a case where a police officer was being sued for civil rights violations allegedly committed on the job, the Supreme Court first asserted that police officers had qualified immunity based on common law. Purcell called this “dubious reasoning” and speculated that the Warren Court, known for progressive rulings such as Brown v. Board of Education (1954) and Loving v. Virginia (1967), “quite likely was reacting to two things: it had made a series of decisions over the years that increased the constitutional rights of defendants and was accused of being anti-police” and this was also a “time of considerable strife in the cities.”
“Quite likely that the Warren Court felt it needed to balance their decisions,” Purcell concluded.
In the 1970s, as the progressive Warren Court was replaced by the more conservative Burger Court, the Supreme Court began moving further right on the issue, with the public policy goal of wanting to protect the “common good” by minimizing “frivolous” lawsuits against governmental entities, according to Purcell. At this time, the courts moved away from the good faith element of qualified immunity as being too subjective and tried to establish a solely objective test of whether or not a police officer acted reasonably under established law.
In cases where officers were acting “under pressure and haste,” Purcell said, courts “had to sympathetically regard their positions,” meaning “mistakes probably don’t count.” Furthermore, officers were further protected from liability if they “had no reason to understand that he or she was violating the established law.” As Purcell explained, the federal courts have ruled that a lawsuit under Section 1983 “needed several cases to make it clear that law was established and from relatively-high jurisdictions and were consistent and close factually.”
Purcell said that this had the effect that it “became more and more difficult to establish law” as it relates to these cases, a point Bragg later echoed, and that “65-70% of such cases were dismissed by federal circuit courts for this reason," though that number is disputed.
“The objective nature of the qualified immunity test operates in special part against Black defendants who are barred from bringing forward evidence of racial motive,” said Purcell, because individual and departmental records of past misbehavior cannot be entered as evidence in such cases.
Williamson, whose work at the ACLU focuses on police misconduct cases, said, “Qualified Immunity is the bane of our existence.” He went further, saying that “one of the biggest byproducts of this doctrine is that courts have been given license to first identify whether qualified immunity exists before even getting to the question of whether the action violated the Constitution.” Williamson mentioned one case he had worked on in which a person suspected of a crime was seriously injured by police dogs and the case could not go forward because the court had ruled the action fell under the purview of Qualified Immunity.
Bragg said that Qualified Immunity “stunts the development of the law. It’s almost like a cycle. If the courts aren’t forced to deal with the underlying constitutional violation, it becomes a pernicious cycle.”
If Qualified Immunity were to be ended, Bragg asserted, “I think you would streamline cases, you would develop the law in a fuller way. It would be very impactful.” However, he noted that “when we talk about police accountability, it’s about the totality of the circumstances. There’s no one thing we can do in this space that can change these cases.” He noted that various studies have determined that between 25% and 50% of deaths caused by police officers initially arise from a mental health incident.
Williamson added that “lower courts have an easy out” on police brutality cases. “That’s a much larger issue and a much larger fight,” he said, but argued “doing away with Qualified Immunity would be a great step in the right direction.”
Purcell added that it is “unlikely there’s going to be a significant change” coming from the courts on their Qualified Immunity rulings. He said that, except for Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the Supreme Court’s liberals have largely adopted the conservatives’ position on Qualified Immunity, based largely on a goal of limiting the federal courts’ case dockets. On the conservative side, Justice Clarence Thomas and the libertarian-leaning Cato Institute have voiced some skepticism of the doctrine.
“The only redress is that the legislature would have to step in,” said Burkhalter, which Congressional Democrats are attempting through the Floyd Act. Williamson voiced some optimism about change, saying that Qualified Immunity “is slowly but surely seeping into mainstream consciousness,” noting the recent strike and protests by NBA players, who included an end to Qualified Immunity for police officers in their list of demands.
When asked about the proposed New York State ban on Qualified Immunity, Purcell said “There’s not reason states can’t do it.” Williamson cautioned, “I don’t know that it would lead to any change on the streets,” given it relates to civil lawsuits that happen after the incident at hand.
In New York City, the Qualified Immunity doctrine made it difficult to bring civil claims against abuses of the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk policy, which was ruled to have been practiced unconstitutionally by the department in its indiscriminate targeting of young men of color.
As a former NYPD detective, Burkhalter told the panel, “I never heard about Qualified Immunity until my sixteenth year in the police department,” and it was during a law school class. He said abolishing or significantly curtailing it would not affect how police officers act. “I don’t believe that police officers by and large are thinking about Qualified Immunity while doing their jobs,” he added.
Burkhalter described police departments as “paramilitary organizations,” which are “structured like the military” through their ranks, disciplinary processes, and insignia, among other things. This, according to Burkhalter, means that departments are “based on a punishment model, not a model of rewards” and that “every member of a police department is made aware of infractions.”
“We indoctrinate our police officers to fear punishment,” said Burkhalter. “We see this from the rhetoric of the unions. It’s their job to protect their members from punishment.” Burkhalter argued that because Qualified Immunity shields officers from potential punishment, it makes it hard to correct misbehavior.
“The purpose of the doctrine is to allow folks to respond without fear of second-guessing snap judgements,” but “we’ve moved far beyond that,” Burkhalter argued. “We do have a system that’s somewhat broken. That’s undeniable. This is the first step. The onus is on the police department to fix their practices.”
Burkhalter said, “You rarely see this brought up. The police department serves not only victims, they also equally serve those accused of a crime, there is no sliding scale of constitutional rights. A suspect’s constitutional rights are the same as a victim’s.”
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by Andrew Millman, Gotham Gazette
@millman_andrew @GothamGazette