The State of New York has dismal voter turnout historically and activists are active working on multiple solutions to this. One such lawsuit, launched by the nonprofit Common Cause and titled New York v Brehm s.d 1:17cv-06770, was kept alive on September 30th by the Obama appointed U.S District Court Judge Alison J. Nathan despite New York State Board of Elections lawyers’ attempts to block its progress. The state had moved to dismiss the complaint but now the lawsuit will move forward.
One trouble with the existing practice is that the names of infrequent voters are not always found in voter registration lists that are available to poll workers. As it works now, voter’s names in the state’s voter registration electronic list are not always present in polling places and voters can be left stranded. Very often in such circumstances, their votes are simply not recorded.
This closely watched court case, filed in 2017, is trying to force the creation of new rules requiring New York polling place officials to remind inactive and unregistered voters who show up to vote that they can still use an affidavit ballot. According to a review of the relevant federal and New York laws by election expert Richard Winger of Ballot Access News, “when an inactive voter arrives at the polling place, he or she must be told about the chance to vote using an “affidavit ballot”.
Common Cause is arguing that the New York State Board of Elections failed to enforce the relevant laws on the books. The judge agreed that the federal laws in question do not conflict with state law. The opinion and court order, about 30 pages long, can be found online in full here.
In the primaries of this year, seen by many as vitally important elections that require citizens to be fully engaged, voter turnout was only an abysmal 11 percent of all eligible voters in the federal primaries. Even this ridiculously unrepresentative voter turnout is better than it used to be and is up a third from voting four years ago.
The conclusion locals need to reach is simple: New York deserves a better democracy than it has now.
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