Groundhog day (election edition)

February 2, 2021

Daily Point

It’s Election Day

You’d be forgiven if you didn’t know. But in a few neighborhoods in Queens, a City Council special election has taken center stage over the last several weeks. And after days of early voting, even the snow didn’t stop the polls from opening Tuesday morning.

While the election only affects a small portion of city voters, the spotlight on who will replace Rory Lancman extends beyond neighborhoods like Briarwood, Kew Gardens Hills and Jamaica. It’s New York’s first attempt at ranked-choice voting and the issues are a microcosm of the push and pull of the left and center of state politics.

There are eight candidates, and voters must rank their first five choices.

As a resident of the district, I’ve been inundated with mail and phone calls over the last several weeks, and candidate signs are everywhere. I’ve rarely seen this much candidate engagement for any race in my area in recent memory, much less a City Council election. Even as I’ve written this, the phone has rung three times, for three candidates.

Even Sen. Bernie Sanders endorsed in the race, and I’m not so sure what he knows about the debate over bus and bike lanes, or a homeless shelter in the district, or the future of Rikers Island and borough-based jails.

The candidates clearly have tried to distinguish themselves from the pack. In one case, the candidate herself called, and spent 20 minutes on the phone going over her views on a host of topics. In another, three representatives from the same candidate called in the same evening. The mail, meanwhile, has been mostly positive. Experience, says James Gennaro. Leadership, offers Soma Syed. Helping families, promises Deepti Sharma. Safety, says Neeta Jain. The American dream, touts Dilip Nath.

But none of that might matter if the voters walk into the polls not even understanding how to vote. And if the scene during the last weekend of early voting was any indication, city and state officials have a long way to go before ranked voting will be ready for prime time.

On Sunday, there was a line of voters waiting at Queens College to vote early, as many hoped to beat the snow. Inside the polling place, confusion awaited. Inside each voter’s folder was a ballot, with a series of somewhat complicated-looking Scantron-style bubbles to fill in, and a small explainer of how to vote. I can’t even imagine what the ballot will look like when there’s more than one race on it. It’s all a bit daunting, and plenty of voters had questions for poll workers. I, for one, had done my research, and still stared at the ballot for a while, to make sure I was filling it out correctly.

Here’s a relatively simple explanation of how a winner is chosen:

First, they’ll add up every candidate’s first-choice votes. If one person gets more than 50% of those first-choice votes, that person wins. If not, votes will be counted in rounds. In each round, the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated, and anyone who ranked that candidate first gets their next-highest available choice counted. That continues until a winner is chosen.

The stakes have seemed even higher in this race, with religion, ethnicity and politics all playing a role. Voters could elect the City Council’s first South Asian American member, as six of the eight candidates are South Asian. Or, they could choose a name they know well – like former Councilman Gennaro, who was term-limited in 2013, is running anew. Lancman, by the way, left the job to work for Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo.

Then there’s the debate over candidates’ ties to the Democratic Socialists of America, and, amazingly in a City Council race, lots of talk about Israel, in part because of a large Orthodox Jewish population in the district. Both liberal and conservative Jewish organizations have emerged as key voices, taking very different sides. And, like in other city and state races, there’ve been plenty of differences between candidates who veer further left politically, and those who stick closer to the middle, especially on issues like police reform and social welfare. "Queens doesn’t need socialism," said one mailer.

For the average voter, it’s all a bit head-spinning. For a resident of the district, like me, it’s a critical moment. And for Election Day junkies, also like me, it’s a race worth watching.

—Randi F. Marshall @RandiMarshall

Talking Point

Party time

The Feb. 14 deadline to express your love for a political party in time for the NYC mayoral primary is looming, and so are the efforts to sway voters in different ways.

There is the push from some like Related Companies chief executive Jeff Blau, who has explicitly urged New Yorkers to register as Democrats even if briefly. There was the email sent last week by Goldman Sachs’ David Solomon pointedly reminding employees about the deadline to declare a party affiliation, which The Point covered last week.

Other heads of Fortune 500 companies sent out similar missives: "The message was a million New York City residents are registered to vote but not in a party," said Kathryn Wylde, president and chief executive of the business-leader group Partnership for New York City. "So if you want to participate in the mayoral primary, you have to indicate a party preference by Feb. 14."

Then there is the push to get voters to move to the Republican Party.

"One-party rule has failed NYC," wrote Phil Orenstein, president of the Queens Village Republican Club, in an email to The Point. "Our city needs a 2-party system with a strong Republican Party as the only firewall against the radical Left Democrats, and the only way to bring our city out of the ‘crisis’ which Democrats themselves admitted to."

In that vein, the venerable Queens club launched Vote2PartyNYC.com last week to encourage voters to register and vote Republican.

The calls for more of an opposition party to Democrats, who control most levers of state political power, are familiar on Long Island. And Orenstein noted that the Queens club has crossed the border to help some Long Island GOP candidates, including Dave Franklin and Ragini Srivastava who lost their bids for State Senate and Assembly, respectively, last year.

Orenstein tied those races in Nassau County to the fight to build Republican power in NYC contests.

"We are all together engaged in the battle for Republican State Senate and Assembly seats, to change the make-up of our one-party State Legislature," he wrote on Monday.

—Mark Chiusano @mjchiusano

Pencil Point

Messy

For more cartoons, visit www.newsday.com/cartoons

Final Point

Bipartisan BOE bites back

Throughout last year’s chaotic election season, New York state lawmakers and advocates took aim at the usual political punching bag: the bipartisan boards of election that run the sometimes messy voting process from Suffolk County to St. Lawrence County.

The criticisms could be more meaningful this time around, though, as Democrats control the governor’s mansion, State Senate and Assembly in Albany and have already moved on wide-ranging election reforms since taking full power in 2018.

Now the state Board of Elections is punching back with a sternly worded statement about the benefits of the current process.

"[W]e, as the four State Election Commissioners, support the continued administration of our elections by bi-partisan county boards," said a statement released last week. It lauded local commissioners and their staffs as "dedicated public servants and in an election unlike any other in our history they performed admirably."

This adds to a similar recent statement from local boards through the Election Commissioners Association, which urged against "radical redesign of the very election system that met the herculean challenges of 2020."

There have been some calls for the boards to be reorganized in various ways, from proposed legislation to State Sen. Zellnor Myrie, chair of that chamber's elections committee, telling The Point last year that changing the two-party-run setup of the boards could be a possibility.

In response to that kind of movement, the commissioners said: "Candidates, public officials and especially voters need to have confidence in an accurate, verifiable, uniform and transparent election process and only a bi-partisan structure can guaranty [sic] that."

The Point asked state BOE spokesman John Conklin the purpose of the commissioners’ statement and its timing.

"They wanted to achieve two things," he wrote in an email, "a strong statement of support for all local boards of elections and their performance during the 2020 General Election and a signal to the Legislature, if they are considering any changes to the structure of the boards of elections, the state Commissioners are unanimous in their support of a bi-partisan structure, one that has been in place for a very long time and has served the state well."

If big BOE changes were to come this year from the State Legislature, they would be a historic shift: the bipartisan structure dates to the New York State Constitution of 1894.