Wednesday, November 6, 2019

Melinda Katz and Juamme Williams celebrate cheap victories in pathetic low voter turnout election

 NY Daily News


Public Advocate Jumaane Williams cruised in his bid for a full term, and Melinda Katz easily won her race for Queens District Attorney Tuesday after a slow Election Day with dismal voter turnout.

New Yorkers trickled to the polls in an off-year election in which the biggest draw might have been a ballot question that proposed a change in the way local races are decided.

Voters approved a city charter change allowing voters in future elections to rank candidates and eliminate costly runoffs.

Under the newly-approved plan, which will begin in 2021, voters will list candidates by preference in case no one wins a clear majority.

Among the measures supporters was Williams, who was celebrating a victory on both fronts.”

"It’s a great validation,” said Williams, who won with 77% of the vote. "People came out and their voices were heard. Over the next two years we’re going to continue our work to reshape the city. 
There is so much left to do.”

Williams, who defeated Staten Island City Councilman Joe Borelli, a Republican, won a special election last winter to replace Letitia James, who won election as state attorney general.

Also celebrating was Katz, who is currently Queens Borough President. Her general election road to the Queens DA seat was much easier than her primary election path, which ended in a court-battle win over insurgent Tiffany Caban.

Katz was elected by a nearly 3 to 1 margin over little-known Republican opponent Joe Murray
 
“We are an unbelievable borough,” Katz said in her victory speech. “We all want a better life for our families than we had ever dreamed for ourselves. We need to make sure there is an infrastructure of support for our young people. Young people need to know it is safer not to pick up a gun than it is to pick up a gun.”

“We are facing here an opportunity to make a national model for criminal justice reform,” Katz added. “We need to make sure we get it right here”

Great validation??

AMNY


Early voting apparently made little difference in shaking off the indifference of New York City voters.

The recent trend of remarkably low voter turnout in the five boroughs didn’t seem to get a boost from nine days of early voting, according to figures from the city’s Board of Elections. What started out on Oct. 26 only yielded a cumulative total of 60,110 voters by the time early voting closed on Nov. 3, the Board of Elections reported.

Less than 40% of registered voters in New York City participated in the 2018 midterm elections, and just 23% turned out for the 2017 mayoral elections. Early voting is expected to help reverse the downward trend in voter turnout in the years to come.

But the program didn’t appear to make a positive impact on the 2019 race, and some recognized early on that the rollout of early voting was not without its flaws.

Mayor Bill de Blasio had called the state legislation to adopt early voting “a chance for us to reinvigorate our democracy,” at a Queens County Democrats pre-election party on Oct. 29 and touted how easy it was for to vote himself.

“I glided into my poll site in Brooklyn and I was out of there in like, five minutes, and it is going to open up a world of opportunity where a lot of people previously thought that voting was not something that they could focus on or take time for, now they’re going to have every opportunity, weekends and weekdays and all sorts of different times when they can vote,” de Blasio said.
Few New Yorkers, however, took the mayor’s advice, as the BOE data indicated.

Manhattan came in with the highest number of early ballots cast at 19,865, followed by Brooklyn at 17,976, Queens at 13,129, the Bronx with 4,893 and Staten Island garnering 4,247.

Those numbers are a far cry from the total number of active and inactive registered voters in the five boroughs, according to state Board of Elections data. The totals are as follows: Manhattan, 1,197,797; Bronx, 833,172; Brooklyn, 1,637,055; Queens, 1,282,887; and Staten Island, 319,473.

When analyzing the city and state data, amNewYork determined that only 1.14 percent of all registered New York City voters participated in early voting across all five boroughs this year.










 

24 comments:

georgetheatheist said...

Will her ex and father of her children, Guardian Angel vigilante Curtis Sliwa, have a say on how the Queens DA office operates, hmmmm?

Anonymous said...

Yay us!! More of the same!

Anonymous said...

I hate this city. Can't wait to leave. If you didn't vote yesterday, go fuck yourself.

Anonymous said...

Great let the third world borough continue to be third worldish.

Anonymous said...

I did early voting at Queens Borough Hall, and it was quick, easy, and very overstaffed. It's a great start, and hopefully will be even more useful in the future, once they get a balanced staffing level.

Anonymous said...

Well for the most part, both Williams and Katz were basically unoppossed. There was only token opposition. God help Queens

M. How said...

Williams says: "Over the next two years we’re going to continue our work to reshape the city. There is so much left to do.”

If the present administration does more to "reshape the city", the mass exodus will look like a swarm of locusts flying over the desert.

How much more can they do to this city? It's already in the bottom of the bucket and when we have local 40 story prisons in our midst, homeowners will be selling everything they own at bargain-basement prices to Chinese nationals looking for green cards.

Sanctuary Cities are the beginning of the end for the middle class but the beginning of a windfalls for deBlazio and his cronies.

Anonymous said...

I wonder why they closed the schools for this election? As with most elections not many people voting and plenty of workers doing nothing.The early voting is stupid,the polls are open all day and night and also there's absentee voting.I was wondering if the early voting results are known before Nov.5.

Anonymous said...

Low voter turnout only increases the likelihood of candidates with radical positions being competitive in, or winning, elections.

Why don't people vote? They're too busy. Or they don't bother to keep up with what's going on. Or they're cynical enough to believe that their vote won't count. Or maybe they just don't give a shit.

For the record, I voted for the Republican. I despise Melinda Katz. Absolutely despise her. But at least she's isn't Caban. That's the only silver lining here.

chico0100 said...

Jumaane Williams - Validation??

Yeah...it's fucking validation that this city give zero shits about experience; about knowledge; about fairness; about anything. What exactly does the Public Advocate do? No one knows, and now they have a formal budget.

Wonder why Trump might win again? Here's the reason; full on, transparent corruption. The Democrats don't care if anyone votes as long as their candidates win...which is by default. Voters here are morons and have no idea what they're doing.

This is why the Electoral College, for President, makes sense. Morons voting for the person that they heard of or look like.


Anonymous said...

They need to make the elections on a weekend instead.

Anonymous said...

Yea, leave the city - and where in the hell are you going to? Name one part of the country that is not messed up in one way or another.

Anonymous said...

On the weekend... they did. Early Voting this year and see the poor turnout for that, too!

Anonymous said...

Elections on a weekend? So union workers have to give up a paid day off? Not bloody likely.

Now we are going to have ranked voting. Ever stand behind a moron at fast food restaurant who can’t decide what he wants? Now we will have thousands of them trying to figure out how to rank candidates. Ain’t nobody got time for that.

Anonymous said...

Huntsville, Alabama

Anonymous said...

General elections are a complete farce in NYC. Until we have open primaries (which will never happen) most voters are excluded from the process. It will be interested to see how ranked choice voting works in the next municipal election. It's hard enough to get people to fill in an oval on the current ballot. Now they're asking people to rank their choices. And then there's the Board of Elections...the counting will be a complete sh*% show.

Anonymous said...

Anonymous said...
Yea, leave the city - and where in the hell are you going to? Name one part of the country that is not messed up in one way or another.

_---------------------------------------
You obviously don't travel much or have lived in other cities. Sure all cities have some issues, but none compared to the bullshit and crap that go on in NYC, not too mention, the quality of life there is AWFUL, it is SUPER EXPENSIVE and it is SO DAMN CROWDED.

By the way, there our cities that have election day on Saturday, which MAKES DAMN SENSE.

Anonymous said...

True, not much of a national traveler there. Where I live they just finished paving over 90% of the streets. Replaced more than half of the fire hydrants with new ones. People live normal lives without homeless drug addicts sleeping on the street and when the electeds don't do what we want, we throw them out. Grow up New Yorkers!

Anonymous said...

>Low voter turnout only increases the likelihood of candidates with radical positions being competitive in, or winning, elections.

Ranked Choice Voting passed, which makes it harder for radicals to get elected, so that will hopefully balance itself out.


>there our cities that have election day on Saturday, which MAKES DAMN SENSE.

Great idea! In a City with a million Jews, make the elections on the one day they can't vote! That won't disenfranchise anyone!

Anonymous said...

She won’t be able to leave work
early anymore as she does as QBP.

Anonymous said...

"She won’t be able to leave work
early anymore as she does as QBP."

Please tell me who is going to stop her.

Harry Bingham IV

Anonymous said...

"Great idea! In a City with a million Jews, make the elections on the one day they can't vote! That won't disenfranchise anyone!"

One could argue that if secular Jews didn't vote, the city would be a much saner place...

The only downside to the idea is that Orthodox Jews couldn't vote.

Harry Bingham IV

Anonymous said...

Secular Jews don't care about the Sabbath, so this would only really disenfranchise right-leaning religious Jews.
Hrm, frame it that way, and certain Dems would suddenly be all in favor of Saturday voting.

Anonymous said...

❝If voting made any difference, they wouldn’t let us do it.❞ —Mark Twain

❝It’s easier to fool someone than to tell them that they’ve been fooled.❞ —Mark Twain

❝It’s difficult to free fools from the chains they revere.❞ —Voltaire

❝You can fool ALL of the people some of the time, and if you do it just once—it lasts four years.❞ —Alfred E. Neuman

❝It’s difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary demands that he NOT understand it.❞ —Upton Sinclair

❝I freed a thousand slaves. I could have freed a thousand more if they knew they were slaves.❞ —Harriet Tubman

❝The chains of habit are too light to be felt—until they are too heavy to be broken.❞ —Richard C. IRITANOD

❝Voting is not an act of political freedom. It is an act of political conformity. Those who refuse to vote are not expressing silence. They are screaming in the politician's ear: 'You do not represent me. This is not a process in which my voice matters. I do not believe you.'❞ —Wendy McElroy

‘LESSER EVIL for SALE’ will ALWAYS be EVIL that will ALWAYS deliver LESS!

❝The masses have never thirsted after truth. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim.❞ —Gustave Le Bon (1841-1931)

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HeMGqTwWA6U

http://www.notbeinggoverned.com/20-reasons-to-not-vote/?fbclid=IwAR2lRGPLWVlMy0VD7q6yCWq5BYt_mibFC4VMJ5EUzITQrnHu7URGQ-zSi1k