Election integrity in New York?

Over the past 20-something years, election integrity has become a hot-button issue in our country. In 2000, Democrats claimed that George W. Bush was an illegitimate president because of hanging chads in Florida. In 2016, Democrats alleged that Donald Trump stole the presidency by secretly colluding with Russia. And in 2020, many Republicans asserted that the presidential election was rigged, which was the catalyst for Jan 6.
None of the claims in any of those elections were proved, but what is clear is that the past two-plus decades of such baseless allegations on both sides of the political aisle have taken their toll on voter confidence on our electoral process. A study in 2000 found an average level of public faith in national elections between 1964 and 1996 of 70 percent. In 2020, a Gallup Poll found that just 59 percent of Americans were very or somewhat confident in U.S. elections.
So you might think it would be government’s main priority to restore faith in our electoral process. Unfortunately, your assumption would be incorrect, and your faith misplaced. Instead, the desire to secure power consistently outweighs restoring public trust in our elections, and common-sense election reforms supported by the public are consistently rejected. A 2021 Monmouth University poll found that 80 percent of Americans support requiring voters to show photo identification to cast a ballot, but Democrats consistently reject that idea. Despite the requirement of photo IDs for everything from library cards to driver’s licenses to accessing Medicaid to boarding an airplane, Democrats, incredibly, claim that requiring voters’ photo IDs would disenfranchise a portion of the population.
Even more concerning, political parties appear to be passing laws that are fundamentally changing our election process — laws that are designed to place a heavy thumb on the election scale in favor of one party over the other.
For the past five years, New York has been a one-party state, with Democrats controlling the Assembly, the Senate and the governor’s office. In that time, Democrats have passed election law after election law not to strengthen and depoliticize state and local elections, but rather to give a blatant advantage to Democratic candidates.

In 2014, then Gov. Andrew Cuomo and other Democrats supported a state constitutional amendment, passed overwhelmingly by the public, that established a Redistricting Commission to independently draw up the state’s political maps to avoid gerrymandering, beginning in 2021. At the time, Republicans controlled the Senate.
When 2020 rolled around, Democrats were in full control, and their desire for that independent commission was gone. They rejected its proposed legislative maps, and tried passing a law to allow themselves to draw the new districts, contrary to the 2014 reforms. Over the express will of the people, Democrats drew the new congressional, Senate and Assembly districts. Ultimately, their action was struck down, deemed unconstitutional, and the districts were redrawn by an independent special master.
After such a strong rebuke by the courts, you might think Democrats would reconsider such political overreach. Unfortunately, the exact opposite has occurred. In the last two weeks of the legislative session in Albany, the Democrats passed laws, which Gov. Kathy Hochul has indicated she will sign, that fundamentally transform the state’s election process.
One bill would move most town and county elections to even-numbered years, when Democrats typically have their highest voter turnout. But the Democratic sponsors of the bill excluded from the legislation all cities, including New York City, village and school board elections, which consistently have among the lowest voter turnout. Opponents of the bill, including me, believe that important local issues, and races for Nassau County and Town of Hempstead offices, would be overshadowed by national and state issues and races. The county and town have held elections in odd-numbered years for over 80 years, but the 18 percent higher turnout in even years may be just what Democrats need to win local legislative seats, which I believe is the true purpose of the change.
Another bill passed by Democrats is the New York Early Mail Voter Act, which would allow voters to cast mail-in ballots without an excuse during the nine-day early-voting period. As things stand, the state Constitution allows voting by mail only for those with specific excuses — a disability, an illness, or an absence from their county on Election Day. In 2021, this same measure was put before state voters as a ballot amendment, and soundly rejected. As a result, the Democrats, as they did with redistricting, ignored the will of the voters will and created this legislative workaround that doesn’t need voter approval.
There will certainly be legal challenges to these bills, but the Democrats also have that covered. In the last days of the session, they passed a bill that requires a person filing a constitutional challenge to an election law to do so in one of only four jurisdictions. To no one’s surprise, those four courts are in areas that are heavily Democratic, with similar judicial profiles.
We passed coincidence in New York a long time ago.
The actions of the Democratic-led State Legislature in the past several years, and particularly this past session, would clearly lead a reasonable person to conclude that these so-called “reforms” have very little to do with restoring trust in our voting system, and instead ensure that the majority party remains in power.
But hey, as many of my Democratic colleagues said as they were passing these “reforms,” they “trust the voters.” That is, if they vote the way Democrats want them to.

Brian Curran represents the 21st Assembly District.