Wednesday, November 16, 2011

The joke vote

From the NY Post:

Suppose they gave an election and almost no one came?

That’s what happened last Tuesday, when a mere 150,000 of the city’s 4.2 million registered voters went to the polls.

Many candidates ran unopposed. The only real contest was on Staten Island, where Republican DA Dan Donovan trounced a Democratic challenger with 70 percent of the vote. Bronx DA Robert Johnson was alone on the ballot. So were half a dozen judges in Manhattan.

That didn’t stop the Board of Elections from staging a full-fledged election, opening all 6,109 election districts in 1,363 polling sites, manned by nearly 25,000 workers.

The estimated cost: $17 million.

Amazingly, the board requested millions more from the city, including $8 million to boost the $200-a-day salaries of the poll workers and $3.5 million for extra staffers. City Hall, which is at war with the board over its finances, quickly rejected the request.

By law, the board has to open every polling site on Election Day. But it has the discretion to consolidate election districts.

12 comments:

Anonymous said...

city hall deserves a half shout out.

Anonymous said...

Wow, I am the 3%

Jerry Rotondi said...

US Democracy:

An unpicked ripened plum
just waiting to fall to the ground
and rot!

If you don't turn out pick a candidate
our republic's days are numbered.

And that's no joke!

Anonymous said...

Anyone notice how the QGOP ran opposition to all the judges? Anyone care?

Anonymous said...

Why should one bother to vote when the candidates for city council and district attorney run unopposed?

Anonymous said...

I looked online to see who was running, and asked someone who did vote. Some judges were running - and they're often unopposed, or even cross-endorsed. Even when there is one Democratic vs. Republican outlier, you know the Democratic candidate is going to win. It's possible I missed some race, but it didn't seem like a big year in my district. I could have gone down, but as I couldn't see any big races, I didn't.

Anonymous said...

Once again---
apathy is the enemy of democracy!

Anonymous said...

By the way, where can I find the election results?

Although DA Richard Brown ran unopposed on several party lines, I'd like to see how many write-in protest votes were registered.

Anonymous said...

The big joke is the voting machines - there are none - it's a pencil and paper. How far back into the ice age are we going to? Also I was hard pressed to find the English in the instructions.

Anonymous said...

Too many of the faithful in both parties make money off of this. There's no incentive to consolidate.

Anonymous said...

I vote in every election...except for this one. I had several judges running and other unopposed figures. Judges don't put up websites or campaign. I know nothing about them about them and it's extraordinarily difficult to find good information about them. My options were to pull a lever blindly or just not vote. I opted for #2.

Anonymous said...

"I vote in every election...except for this one. I had several judges running and other unopposed figures. Judges don't put up websites or campaign."

Never heard of Google? The NYS Office of Court Administration posts profiles of judicial candidates. Most choose to put up a profile. There is no reason not to vote in every single election, except laziness and apathy. You are the reason we will lose all our rights as US citizens.