Erin Durkin

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.”

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.”

Twenty-one City Council members made a final push for a rent freeze before Monday night’s vote of the Rent Guidelines Board.

“This year, striking a fair balance means voting for a rent freeze,” wrote City Councilman Ben Kallos (D-Manhattan) and colleagues from all five boroughs in a letter to the board.

Aspiring policy wonks as young as 16 could serve on their local community boards under a resolution passed Wednesday by the City Council.

The Council is asking Albany to let 16- and 17-year-old serve on the local boards, which weigh in on zoning changes, liquor licenses, and sidewalk cafes in their neighborhoods.

Currently, the minimum age for the 51 local panels representing neighborhoods across the city is 18.

“Youth deserve a voice on their local community boards. These boards deal with issues that affect their daily lives and the neighborhoods that they live in,” said Councilman Ben Kallos (D-Manhattan), the sponsor of the resolution.

Under legislation to be introduced by Councilman Ben Kallos (D-Manhattan), the city would be required to post all government notices on its website — from announcements of a community board meeting to an application for a new sidewalk cafe.

“There’s literally hundreds and hundreds of places where the government has to make a public notice — but nobody knows what the government is doing, because the public notice requirements are so arcane,” said Kallos, chairman of the government operations committee.

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.