Elections

At a hearing Monday, the New York City Council's Committee on Governmental Operations approved the latest drafts of two bills that enhance the responsibility of city agencies to conduct voter registration and a resolution calling for the State Legislature to pass similar legislation.

These measures are an attempt by the Council to improve the compliance of City agencies with Local Law 29, also known as the Pro-Voter Law, which was passed in 2000. The law requires 19 city agencies to handle voter registration applications for customers.

Council Member Ben Kallos, chair of what he called the "good government committee," introduced Intro 493 A which expands scope of the Pro-Voter law and sets a deadline of December 1, 2015 for agencies to integrate their forms with voter registration.

The Council also passed a bill to require more city agencies to register New Yorkers to vote.

Seven agencies including the Human Resources Administration and Department for the Aging will be newly required to distribute registration forms under the bill, sponsored by Councilman Ben Kallos (D-Manhattan.) 

Voters would be able to register to vote and apply for an absentee ballot at the same time under a bill to be introduced in the City Council this week.

Councilman Ben Kallos (D-Manhattan) will sponsor the measure, meant to streamline what is now a slow process.

“Voters don’t actually plan their lives around election day,” Kallos said. “This is a transient city where people are moving to where affordable housing is. And this would help a huge group of voters to be able to register and get an absentee ballot.”

A new bill set to be introduced in the New York City Council this week would allow voters to register to vote and apply for an absentee ballot simultaneously.

Councilman Ben Kallos (D-Manhattan) – who serves as Deputy Chair of the Council’s Jewish Caucus – will sponsor the measure, which is intended to streamline what is currently a slow process.

“Voters don’t actually plan their lives around Election Day,” Kallos said to the Daily News. “This is a transient city where people are moving to where affordable housing is. And this would help a huge group of voters to be able to register and get an absentee ballot.”

New Yorkers would finally be able to register to vote with a click of a mouse under a bill to be introduced in the City Council.

Councilman Ben Kallos (D-Manhattan) will introduce legislation to allow would-be voters to register online.

Currently, the Board of Elections requires paper registration forms to be mailed in the old fashioned way.

“We hope to have a city where everyone who is eligible can vote easily,” Kallos said. “We make it really hard to register, really hard to vote, and we can make it a lot easier.”

Fifteen more city agencies will be required to distribute voter registration forms under a bill to be introduced in the City Council Tuesday. The bill sponsored by Councilman Ben Kallos (D-Manhattan) will require agencies like the NYPD, FDNY, the Human Resources Administration, which handles welfare benefits, and the Department for the Aging, which runs senior centers, to have the forms on hand at offices where they interact with the public.

The New York City Campaign Finance Board will ask the City Council on Monday for sweeping changes to the rules governing the city's system of publicly financing candidates.

Chief among the proposed reforms is permission for the board to accelerate payments of matching funds to qualifying candidates. Specifically, the board is recommending a single payment in June, no earlier than four business days after the June 10 deadline for candidates to join the matching funds program.

Currently, candidates must be on the ballot in order to receive the 6-to-1 match from the board. Because the law prohibits payouts until challenges to petitions are settled and ballots are determined, those running for office cannot get matching funds until five weeks before the primary.

Now, a City Council member, Ben Kallos (D-Upper East Side), has introduced a resolution calling on Gov. Andrew Cuomo to sign into law bill A-8198, the Democratic Assembly bill, and for the Senate to pass and the governor to sign S-6204, the corresponding state Senate bill.

The head of the city Board of Elections stunned City Council members on Tuesday by claiming that the long-battered agency was purposely shorted funds by the city so it would fail.

BOE director Michael Ryan made the conspiracy-laden accusation as part of a pitch to secure a whopping $55 million in additional funding from the city’s coffers, even as his agency remains under investigation by the city.

The Board of Elections is pushing a $6.8 million plan to turn old voter machines into voter information kiosks, but the chair of the City Council committee overseeing the agency dismissed the scheme as too costly. 

The machines, costing $4500 a piece, would transform the old lever machines into massive computers where poll workers could check in for work, voters could get directions to their poll sites, and election results could be transmitted at the end of the night.