Wednesday, December 9th
Good evening members of the Voter Assistance Advisory Committee of the NYC Campaign Finance Board I am New York City Council Member Ben Kallos.
Thank you for providing this opportunity to the public in order to get feedback on what was one of the most consequential elections of our lifetime. My comments today will be brief.
More poll sites
In the most recent presidential election, New Yorkers finally had the opportunity to vote early, however, many voters had to wait for hours in the rain to vote early. An astonishing, yet not totally surprising, 839,875 votes had been cast in the first 7 days of early voting. We have known for years about the possible long lines, especially ahead of this particular election, due to insufficient hours and locations in the state’s implementation of Early Vote. That is why I have been calling for longer hours and additional early voting sites in order to take on hours-long lines.
In 2019, the Albany legislature passed early voting, requiring only 60 hours of voting over 9 days and only up to 7 early vote sites per county, regardless of the county’s population. I first raised alarms about the insufficiency of this mandate at a City Council hearing on March 12, 2019, demanding more sites from the Board of Elections.
Way back in 2014, I proposed Introduction 593 to establish early voting for municipal elections. This legislation would have guaranteed at least one early vote site per Council District for a minimum total of 51, voting open for 12 hours on each weekday and 8 hours on each weekend day. Since then we have updated the requirements and reintroduced the bill to reflect the state’s new early vote program. The bill now mandates at least 8 early voting sites per district, and adds 4 hours per weekday and 3 hours per weekend day to the hours we saw in the 2020 election, totaling 32 additional hours of voting and a 92 hours altogether to vote early.
VOTER PORTAL
In 2016, I authored and passed Local Law 65 to require the Board of Elections to provide voters with absentee ballot tracking from their request, to when it gets mailed, and when it gets received. Despite testifying that the Board of Elections (BOE) could implement the system in 2015, they chose not to, leaving more than 100,000 voters disenfranchised in the Primary. It took 5 years and a pandemic to finally implement and it isn’t even fully complete with missing
Online voter registration
Currently, you can only register to vote online if you have a New York State issue identification or driver’s license and that’s not good enough. In late 2017, the City Council passed online voter registration that I authored as Local Law 238 to mandate that the Campaign Finance Board build an online portal to expand access to voter registration. In June 2019 the Campaign Finance Board was ready to launch, just in time for the legislature in Albany to blocked our implementation with a new law. To be clear Albany blocked New York City residents from being able register online to vote for President. As of October 2020, a total of 40 states have online voter registration, but not New York, it needs to change now. Next year is an off-year election everywhere else in New York, if Albany won’t enfranchise the rest of the state, then at least let us register New York City residents in time for 2021.
Ballot Access
When Covid-19 hit New York in the middle of petitioning for the 2020 elections, Governor Cuomo cut petitioning short and lowered the threshold needed for candidates to get on the ballot, in order to limit the spread of the virus.. With hundreds of candidates running for municipal office in 2021 during a pandemic, we have heard renewed calls for a ballot access system that will not put New Yorkers at risk of contracting and spreading Covid-19. I have introduced Introduction 730, which would allow a candidate to qualify for the ballot without petitioning if they have qualified for the city’s public matching campaign finance system that candidates should be able to be on the ballot. Adding this as an option to the way candidates can get on the ballot would minimize risk to candidates and the public during the pandemic. If deemed necessary and safe, petitioning could remain an option for candidates who have not met the matching funds threshold. We are all familiar with the face-to-face interactions petitioning and canvassing require, and I am worried that it will exacerbate the spread of Covid-19 by forcing hundreds of candidates and volunteers to approach strangers, share pens, and take other unnecessary risks. Petitioning is an archaic requirement that dates back to the 1800s, and this year is the right year to give candidates another option, which is even more representative of support in from voters.
Ranked Choice Voting
[Full testimony Not Available yet, delivered extemporaneously]