What's on the back of the ballot

A friendly voting reminder from Queens Crap

Sample Ballot SD11 by queenscrapper on Scribd

Above is a sample ballot for a district in northeast Queens. Please be advised that all ballots throughout the borough will be similar to this one. There are many races this year plus ballot questions, which means each voter will get TWO pages to fill out, front and back.

Stavisky ballot signatures deemed valid

Times Ledger

From the Times Ledger:

A hearing at the Manhattan office of the city Board of Elections Tuesday found objections to state Sen. Toby Stavisky’s (D-Flushing) campaign petitions to be insufficient to knock the incumbent off the ballot for the upcoming election.

The challenges raised by her Democratic opponent, S.J. Jung, and other residents within the district, claimed the signatures to qualify her for re-election were illegible or had addresses outside of the district, leaving only 13 out of 3,519 valid. Commissioners from the BOE, however, determined there were 2,243 valid signatures, which met the minimum of 1,000 required for Stavisky to make it on the ballot.

So she submitted 1,276 bogus signatures, and that's okay?

What the ballot questions are about

From Capital New York:

PROP 1: REDISTRICTING

If approved: The constitutional amendment would establish a commission to redraw legislative and congressional district lines, as required by the federal government to account for population changes every 10 years. Currently, lawmakers themselves handle redistricting, a system good-government groups argue leads to gerrymandering. The new panel would include legislative appointees.

PROP 2: PRINTING BILLS

If approved: Also a constitutional amendment, this proposal would remove the requirement that bills are printed before lawmakers may vote on them. Lawmakers would still need access to the bills for three days before voting, absent a message of necessity from the governor, but the legislation could be distributed in electronic form instead.

PROP 3: BONDING FOR EDUCATIONAL TECHNOLOGY

If approved: The state would be authorized to borrow $2 billion for various education purposes. Proposed by Cuomo in his 2014 State of the State, the chief advertised purpose of the bond is for technology upgrades in school districts, which vary widely in terms of their resources. While the funds would cover infrastructure upgrades to support reliable, high-speed internet access and devices like laptops and tablets, there are other allowable uses. For example, school districts might use it to build or renovate pre-kindergarten classrooms, obtain space to eliminate trailers in overcrowded schools or to purchase high-tech security upgrades. The money would be distributed using existing school-aid formulas. Approval of the bond act would also authorize the state to borrow another $5 million for technology upgrades in schools that serve students with disabilities.

Click the link above to read more about them.

Lawsuit over 2022 redistricting

From Epoch Times/AP:

A government watchdog group is challenging the wording of a ballot question on redistricting, saying the referendum on this fall’s ballot is deceptive.

Common Cause-New York announced the lawsuit Tuesday. The organization is one of several that have criticized the ballot question, which will ask voters to authorize a new commission to handle redistricting beginning in 2022. That’s the next time the state’s political districts will be redrawn to account for population changes.

The referendum says the commission will be independent, even though top lawmakers would pick eight of its 10 members, and the Legislature would have the power to reject any commission proposal it didn’t like.

Common Cause Executive Director Susan Lerner, a plaintiff in the suit, says the proposition is misleading and should be rejected.

What else is on the ballot?

From the 2013 NYC Voter Guide:

On November 5^th, you will be voting YES or NO on six ballot proposals to amend the New York State Constitution. These six proposals are covered in depth below, starting with the official text of the ballot question and a description of the effect it will have if passed. To help you decide, the CFB has provided reasons to vote yes or no based on media coverage and other public commentary. The CFB also reached out to the public, requesting organizations and individuals to submit "pro" or "con" statements explaining why they support or oppose each proposal. (These statements are provided as supplied by the authors.)

The information below does not necessarily reflect all the reasons to support or oppose each proposal.

Proposal 1 | Authorizing Casino Gaming

Proposal 2 | Additional Civil Service Credit for Veterans with Disabilities Certified Post-Appointment

Proposal 3 | Exclusion of Indebtedness Contracted for Sewage Facilities

Proposal 4 | Settling Disputed Title in the Forest Preserve

Proposal 5 | In Relation to a Land Exchange in the State Forest Preserve with NYCO Minerals, Inc.

Proposal 6 | Increasing Age until which Certain State Judges Can Serve

Shafran not conceding to Vallone

From the Daily News:

City Council hopefuls Paul Vallone and Austin Shafran are separated by just 144 votes in a Democratic Primary race that is still too close to call.

The two are leading a five-candidate battle for a shot at the northeastern Queens seat currently held by disgraced Republican City Councilman Dan Halloran.

Vallone, the son of former speaker Peter Vallone and the brother of City Councilman Peter Vallone Jr., claimed victory Tuesday night when unofficial tallies showed he had 2,723 votes. But Shafran, with 2,579 votes, refused to concede until the voting machines are checked and paper ballots counted, a process that begins on Monday.

“Protecting voting rights is the foundation of our democracy so we will use every legal option possible to ensure every vote is fully and fairly counted,” he said Wednesday.

And the winner is?????

From the Times Ledger:

Despite the fact that two City Council candidates had each claimed victory in southeast Queens’ special election, by the next night the city Board of Elections had yet to count the votes on a missing memory stick, and it may be weeks before an official winner is declared.

By Wednesday night Donovan Richards had a 26-vote lead over Pesach Osina, according to the board’s preliminary results, with paper and absentee ballots yet to be counted, as well as the votes on a missing, mystery memory stick used in electronic voting machines.

Both Richards and Osina had already declared themselves the winner by the early hours Wednesday morning and did not lay off throughout the day. Richards said the missing votes would come in from outside Osina’s Orthodox Jewish community and tweeted that his closest opponent “ran a hell of a campaign.”

Osina released a statement saying he expected to be the winner when the votes were counted.

“I’m confident that when all the votes are final, we will be victorious!” he said.

According to election law, however, the board will not begin counting affidavits and absentee ballots until Wednesday, and with such a scant margin separating the top two candidates, next week’s results could trigger an automatic recount.

A spokeswoman at the BOE said that if the margin of victory is less than 0.5 percent, a manual recount is automatically triggered, a process that could take weeks.

Richards was leading Osina by 0.3 percent.

Dead woman signs petition of Stavisky & Iannece

From the Times Ledger:

A candidate for the state Senate seat based in Flushing has charged that his opponent, state Sen. Toby Stavisky (D-Whitestone), got onto the ballot with forged signatures, including one of a dead woman.

John Messer, an Oakland Gardens business owner and lawyer, released an affidavit signed by Jesus Palomino, saying that his mother Ana Rita Palomino could not have signed a designating petition for a slew of Democratic candidates, including Stavisky, this summer.

His mother died in February 2011.

“The petition signature shown to me that designates Toby Stavisky for the office of state senator and submitted to the Board of Elections could not have been that of my mother,” the notarized affidavit said.

Redistricting a joke no matter how you slice it

From the NY Post:

A new electoral map drawn by a federal judge last week has turned up the heat on Albany’s once-a-decade legislative redistricting fight.

But while redistricting can be a matter of life and death for individual lawmakers, the exercise is of scant practical import to most New Yorkers.

It simply makes no real difference how the salami gets sliced — because the interests of the political machines have already been guaranteed.

It’s no accident that, as Citizens Union reported last year, 96 percent of incumbents in Albany won re-election between 1999 and 2010.

As CU notes, 35 incumbent lawmakers faced no opposition whatsoever, not even from minor parties, in the 2010 general election. (And besides those who died or quit voluntarily, more than a quarter who left office between 1999 and 2010 departed either in handcuffs or under an ethical cloud, rather than via the voting booth.)

Gerrymandering — redrawing district lines to assure that incumbents keep their base — is certainly part of it.

But unless you’re among the lucky few to get the nod from party kingpins, you stand little chance of even making it on the ballot in the first place.

It well may be that no plan designed by the very pols who’d have to live with it will serve voters.

But real reform will have to go well beyond drawing new district lines — with reform of ballot-access laws being key.

Until it does, you might as well toss all the maps in the circular file.

80,000 uncounted ballots found in Queens

From the NY Times:

The city’s Board of Elections routinely reminds New Yorkers that the election night vote count is unofficial and preliminary.

Still, the difference in the results from Nov. 2 and in the returns formally certified by the board on Wednesday seems striking: The board found 195,055 votes, or 17 percent more votes, than were originally reported.

That differential — which nearly equals the total vote for governor in the Bronx and Staten Island combined — does not include an additional 28,442 affidavit ballots that New Yorkers cast at the polls on Election Day because of missing registrations or other reasons and another 30,665 absentee and military ballots and scattered write-in votes.

The preliminary machine tally alone swelled from 1,145,826 on election night to 1,366,881 in the official version.

The largest cache of newly found machine ballots was in Queens — about 80,000, or 31 percent more than were reported on election night.

A Board of Elections spokeswoman had no immediate explanation for the disparity.
While the discrepancy between the number of votes counted on election night and those that were ultimately certified is noteworthy, it was not large enough to reverse the results in any election.

Crowley believes in more tweeding, less democracy

From the Queens Chronicle:

[Congress Member Joe] Crowley predicted that both city ballot initiatives would pass, which they did, though he said he was against them.

One proposed to restrict term limits and the other proposed funding transparency and sought to make it easier for candidates to get on the ballot. “There needs to be a real threshold,” Crowley said, regarding the number of candidates permitted in a given election.

What's wrong with having a choice among candidates?

Immigrants and voting - two opinions

From Sunnyside Post:

It is time for our evolving democracy to embrace voting rights in local elections for all residents. We are all stakeholders in our community and should have a say in important local issues. In the words of the Revolutionary patriots who put their lives on the line for the freedoms we enjoy today, “No taxation without representation.”

Our democracy is becoming ever more inclusive, but we still have a long way to go. Over the years, we have recognized the right of African Americans, women, and others to vote. Even so, this progress has not yet extended to all residents. Tax paying residents who do not yet have citizenship cannot vote, even in local elections.

New York has always been a beacon for both immigrants and democracy. This is why we should lead the way in ensuring that our non-citizen community members can exercise the right to vote in local elections.

Meanwhile, in Brooklyn...courtesy of Sheepshead Bites:

“For far too long, dozens of thousands of the Russian-American senior citizens of New York have been shut out of the voting process unfairly because of the language barrier,” pontificated State Sen. Carl Kruger when he introduced the legislation. Passed by the New York state Senate 48 to14 on May 28, the bill, known as S. 552 – An act to amend the election law in relation to providing Russian-language voting materials” passed the state Assembly with only 23 members dissenting out of 132 votes cast.

Russian was thereby added to the list of existing alternate languages in which election material must be printed, the others being Spanish, Chinese and Korean.

...we don’t really have a need for these translations. I don’t know who is going to be reading them, when all this can be heard on the radio in a form that is a lot more interesting and less officious.

Other than that, I have never had any problems at the voting polls. Respectful Russian–speaking volunteers showed and explained everything.

It appears that the motivation behind this bill was painfully transparent — it was a dishonest and disrespectful misjudging of the Russian community by the politicians.

“In my humble opinion, I just don’t understand real purpose of this bill,” immigrant Boris Borovoy states flatly. “The majority of politically active Russian-Americans are fluent in English and have no need for a Russian translation; to me it’s another pork barrel, another waste of taxpayers’ money for a mostly symbolic purpose.

And for hard-working, middle-class Russian-Americans it’s real slap in a face. “Want to make some important political decisions? Learn English, comrade. That’s as simple as it gets”.

How should you vote on the charter issues?

Someone asked that we talk about the Charter Revision ballot measures.

Queens Civic Congress advises you to vote yes on question 1 and no on question 2.

But others disagree.

Here's some info on the ballot measure that deals with transparency in campaign finance reporting.

And here's another about the ballot measure meant to bring about environmental justice.

These are on the reverse side of the form, so make sure you fill out both sides before you feed it into the machine. Here are all the questions.

Board of Elections fires director

NEW YORK (AP) — The embattled New York City Board of Elections has fired its executive director a week before Election Day.

The board's commissioners voted to fire George Gonzalez at a meeting Tuesday. Board spokeswoman Valerie Vazquez says a deputy executive director and an administrative manager will handle his responsibilities until a replacement is selected.

Gonzalez oversaw a September primary plagued with problems surrounding new automated voting machines that resemble ATMs and replaced an old mechanical lever system.

Board members testified at a City Council hearing some polling sites opened late on primary day and thousands of poll workers weren't trained.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg called the board's performance a "royal screw-up."

Gonzalez said at the hearing officials were trying to figure out how to make the Nov. 2 election go more smoothly, including retraining coordinators who oversee polling sites.

Instructions don't match voting forms

From NBC:

Talk about turning voters upside down.

New York's new ballot has a head-spinning set of instructions on the back, which, if followed to the letter, could lead to an incorrect vote.

Here's how it happened -- or, as the kids say, went down.

State lawmakers approved the language, and it got certified by the U.S. Justice Department. That language reads: "To vote for a candidate whose name is printed on this ballot fill in the oval above or next to the name of the candidate." Except of course, that's impossible. All of the ovals appear underneath the candidate names.

"Basically the instruction is wrong," said Lawrence Norden of the Brennan Center for Justice, a government watchdog. "More people than usual are going to be looking at the instructions, and at the very least they're going to be confused."

But George Gonzalez, Executive Director for the New York City Board of Elections, said critics should take a deep breath. "This was the same ballot 400,000 people cast without a problem," he said, speaking about primary night.

Yet, there were myriad other issues during the September 14 primary -- from less-than-informed poll workers to machine malfunctions. But improper voting due to faulty instructions was not one of them, said Gonzalez.

Nice. Other new ballot shenanigans are being investigated.