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.

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]

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.

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.”

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."

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.”

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.”

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.”

(photo: City University of New York)

Attaining a bachelor’s degree takes longer than four years for some full-time CUNY students who are unable to register for required and elective courses due to insufficient seats, a problem whose scope was revealed in a new audit by New York State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli. Delaying graduation is time consuming, expensive, and can mean no more financial aid for students who qualify for a maximum of eight semesters of such support. 

About 30% of CUNY students earn their degree within four years and 53% earn their degree after six years, according to DiNapoli’s audit released September 1. Along with limited course offerings, a shortage of advisors is also contributing to CUNY’s low four-year graduation rate. “CUNY has historically offered an educational path to many who otherwise couldn’t attend college, but limited options may make it harder to graduate or force some out of school,” DiNapoli said in a press release. 

Low graduation rates can be attributed to socioeconomic factors such as the need for part-time and full-time jobs, academic readiness, child care needs, and more. However, the audit concluded “CUNY is not effectively matching course offerings to student demand.” 

Over a third of surveyed CUNY students from five senior colleges said they were unable to register for a course due to a limited number of seats. Half those students stated the course was a requirement for their major and therefore necessary for graduation. 

“It’s frustrating,” Queens College senior Sanzeda Rahman told Gotham Gazette. “Once I was trying to get into a psychology class but all the sections were full. Without taking that pre-requirement I wouldn’t be able to take other psychology classes and would fall behind.” Without guidance from the department, Rahman eventually got in after emailing every professor teaching the course, in hopes of taking advantage of the overtally system that approves waitlisted students based on graduation priority. 

Hunter and Queens Colleges are among the largest senior colleges with over 20,000 enrolled students each. A quarter of students surveyed at both could not register for a required or elective course. Meanwhile 23% of Lehman students, 17% of City Tech students and 11% of College of Staten Island students reported the same. 

Popular majors like biology, computer science, and psychology had the most registration complaints. 

Most course listings are based on enrollment numbers from past semesters as well as decisions made by departments based on budgets, instructors, and other factors, but not student input. 

According to a 2018 CUNY Student Experience Survey mentioned repeatedly in DiNapoli’s audit, 42% of students stated they would like more evening courses, 35% wanted more weekend courses, and over half sought more online courses. Yet, six out of 25 departments surveyed across CUNY don’t offer a full course-load only through evening and weekend classes. 

“During registration, they don’t help us,” said Rahman, referring to academic advisors. “I use Degreeworks to register for my classes and stay on track.” Degreeworks is CUNY’s online planning tool to keep track of student progress. 

Setting appointments with academic advisors is strenuous according to Hunter alumna Barbara Syska, who graduated in spring 2019 after six years. “I had a lot of trouble getting the correct information from my advisor and it delayed my graduation by a year,” said Syska. 

About 30% of surveyed students stated that academic advisors were not beneficial to them. “Several students across several majors stated they were sometimes incorrectly registered or advised to take courses that were not necessary for their academic program, causing their graduation to be delayed,” the audit states.  

This was the case for Syska, a full-time student with a full-time job. She expected to have her degree in five years but at her graduation advising appointment, she realized she would have to delay it even longer. Her biology advisor informed her that the major requirements changed but she could abide by the old requirements, she said, but at her appointment she realized that wasn't the case and in order to graduate, she’d have to register for those extra courses. Then after taking a class via e-permit, which allows students to register for courses at other CUNY colleges, Syska was half a credit short because the course was not equivalent to the Hunter requirement. “If someone would’ve told me before my graduation appointment, I wouldn’t have had to take another class to make up half a credit,” said Syska. 

“My advisor’s office hours were very limited,” said Syska, making it difficult to meet considering her heavy schedule. Some CUNY departments don’t provide an adequate amount of advisors with ratios like three to 2,100 students at Hunter’s psychology department and three to 1,400 at Queens’ computer science department, according to the audit.  

Without proper academic advice, students can have difficulty navigating their course-loads and staying on track for graduation. “Several students indicated they would like to talk to an advisor during registration but, based on the number of advisors for their department, this would result in long waits, even with an appointment,” the audit found. 

About 60% of all CUNY students receive federal Pell grants. Students who exceed four years aren’t eligible for financial aid and it is unrecorded by CUNY whether those students continue without aid or graduate. However, the audit found about 5,000 students whose aid ended in spring 2019 and 31% of them either dropped out that spring or did not end up graduating from CUNY. 

The audit states CUNY officials “indicated that many CUNY students are non-traditional, older students with outside responsibilities who cannot register for the 15 credits” per semester and therefore don’t graduate in four years. Yet, in 2020 CUNY reported that 75% of its students are “traditional” students, meaning under the age of 25, indicating traditional students are also graduating within six years.  

The Professional Staff Congress, CUNY’s staff and faculty union, has repeatedly argued that reduced state funding is putting students at a disadvantage. “That any state would allow—or even cause—such [budget] shortfalls is shameful, but especially so in New York,” PSC President Barbara Bowen said in the union’s testimony on the 2020-2021 state executive budget put forth by Governor Cuomo early this year. “Many CUNY students take extra years to graduate or never attain degrees because CUNY lacks the resources essential for student success.” 

“Incremental cuts and flat budgets may look innocuous, but repeated year after year they add up to a policy of destroying the University’s capacity to provide the education and support CUNY’s half-million students need,” Bowen said. At the time, in February, PSC was pushing for $208 million more for senior colleges and $24.6 million more for community colleges to cover mandatory cost increases, close the TAP gap, add full-time faculty and counselor positions, increase community college base aid and restore legislative funding. 

According to a CUNY spokesperson, the university is now offering close to 50,000 courses, almost all of them online, similar to previous semesters. “We continue to do more with less to support our students,” Chancellor Félix V. Matos Rodríguez wrote in an email on August 31 to eight members of the New York City congressional delegation, discussing cuts the university had made and reiterating a call for federal funding. “Even with roughly $64 million lost tuition revenue from a 4.4% drop in fall enrollment as of Aug. 25 we have continued to offer about the same number of sections as last Fall and overall class size, system-wide, is on average lower than it has been in the last six years.”

DiNapoli’s audit team suggested CUNY institute many changes to improve graduation rates. The main suggestions include ensuring students are able to register for elective and required courses, having department officials in charge of scheduling survey students about course needs, and improving advisor training and advisors’ communication with students. 

“CUNY should offer more courses as needed and invest in more and better advisors to help students of color succeed,” said Rahman.

And CUNY appears ready to do so. As noted in DiNapoli’s audit, CUNY agreed with all the suggestions and is taking various actions to support student success. Those actions include implementing a “Curriculum & Events Management System” at every college organizing registration and scheduling, adding more general education and high-demand courses online, improving advisement services online, and training about 900 advisors across the university.

A pre-pandemic Census press conference (photo: Michael Appleton/Mayor's Office)

With less than a month left till the U.S. Census Bureau intends to end its constitutionally-mandated decennial population count, elected officials and advocates issued a dire warning to New Yorkers on Tuesday to fill out the Census questionnaire or risk losing crucial funding for a raft of federal programs as well as political representation in Congress.

Last month, the Trump administration moved up the deadline for the 2020 Census from October 31 to September 30, leaving the Census Bureau and local and state officials scrambling to ensure an accurate count, which has already been thrown into jeopardy by the coronavirus pandemic. The Census Bureau currently has enumerators out in the field attempting to count those households that have not self-responded through the online portal or by mail.

As of August 31, the nationwide response rate to the Census was 64.9%, according to the CUNY Mapping Service’s Census tracking project; New York State’s response rate was 61% and New York City’s was 57.7%. Census data is used to determine many billions of dollars in funding to states and localities and seats in the U.S. House of Representatives.

At a Tuesday news conference, New York elected officials and Census advocates raised concerns about the state’s response lagging behind the nation and the detrimental effects that could have over the next decade. The Census count determines how the federal government distributes funds for everything from education and health care to infrastructure, transit, and a range of social welfare programs. It also forms the basis for drawing electoral districts at the local, state, and congressional levels and New York, with it’s already declining population, stands to lose as many as two seats in the House due to an undercount in the Census.

As U.S. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand pointed out at the news conference, New York receives more than $73 billion in federal funds annually for 55 programs, out of a $1.5 trillion pot.

“We need that funding to respond to this pandemic and prepare for the next one,” she said, noting that the state could lose money for Medicaid, maternal health, housing assistance, among other programs. “The federal government won't know how much our communities should get if they don't know how many people live there,” she added. Gillibrand has joined with Democratic and Republican Congressional representatives to call on the Trump administration to extend the deadline for delivering Census data and has pushed for that provision to be included in any potential stimulus package that is approved by Congress.

“The Census is more important than ever amidst the ongoing pandemic, which has already badly harmed our state and city budgets and has laid bare many of the inequities that currently exist in our communities,” said U.S. Rep. Jerry Nadler of Manhattan and Brooklyn. “If we don't get an accurate count, this will only be made worse.”

The Trump administration’s move to shift the deadline has also been challenged in court and, on Tuesday, New York State Attorney General Letitia James filed an amicus brief in that case on behalf of a coalition of 23 attorneys general, five cities, four counties, and the U.S. Conference of Mayors.

“An undercount would skew state and local representation when the districts are redrawn and federal funding could be drawn off and decreased for many urban areas with large immigrant populations like New York City,” James said at the news conference. “This could affect our roads, our bridges, our schools, the number of first responders we have in our communities and so much more. And while each of these situations are on face value costly, it's important to note that what is at stake is so much more than just numbers. It's about the people who will be adversely impacted by these numbers.”

What makes the Census particularly challenging in New York is the number of hard-to-count communities that tend to not participate in the Census or that are often miscounted. That includes immigrants, low- and middle-income Black communities, Native Americans, seniors, children under the age of five, people with limited English proficiency and non-English speakers, among others.

President Donald Trump has also taken several steps that seemed geared towards discouraging participation. His administration unsuccessfully attempted to place a citizenship question on the Census and underfunded the Census Bureau. On July 21, Trump also issued a memo to Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross, ordering that undocumented immigrants be excluded from state populations for the apportionment of congressional representatives. That order has been challenged in court.

“Under the Trump administration, the Census has become about fear and misinformation,” said Meeta Anand, the Census 2020 senior fellow at the New York Immigration Coalition, at Tuesday’s news conference.

Recognizing those many challenges, city officials are in the midst of a concerted $40 million Census outreach campaign and recently launched a home-stretch effort, particularly to target areas where the response has been far lower than other parts of the city.

Led by Census Director Julie Menin, appointed to the role by Mayor Bill de Blasio, the city launched a massive ad campaign across 26 languages, more than 175 publications and websites covering radio, television, social media. City Census workers have made more than 3.5 million phone calls and sent more than 7 million texts about the Census, getting more than 423,000 New Yorkers to fill out the questionnaire, the city Census office said.

“Let's be clear what this fight is about. It's an insidious political ploy to defund cities like New York, to have us lose congressional representation and move that funding and congressional representation to Red Republican districts all across the country,” Menin said Tuesday.

The city is also attempting to reach the thousands of New Yorkers who left the city during the pandemic but who requested absentee ballots for the recent primary elections. Many of them completed the Census using their temporary addresses, which would require them to re-fill the questionnaire, which takes roughly 10 minutes, to be counted as New York residents.

At the state level, Governor Andrew Cuomo re-launched some semblance of Census outreach efforts at the end of July after months of inaction. The state was originally pledged to put $70 million toward the Census, including grants to community outreach groups and the reallocation of state agency resources, but the Cuomo administration did not follow through, in part, it has indicated, due to the budget crunch resulting from the coronavirus pandemic.

As part of a recent “Census Push Week,” the state said it was partnering with Spanish-language media outlets to conduct phone-banking, while several public-facing state agencies such as the MTA and Department of State’s Division of Licensing Services rolled out awareness initiatives of their own. There has been little additional news, however. A request for comment to Empire State Development, the state’s economic development agency that is overseeing the Census effort, went unanswered.