Second Circuit Takes Power Away From Party Bosses

In a unanimous vote, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit affirmed – in its entirety – the decision of U.S. District Court Judge John Gleeson granting a motion for preliminary injunctive relief in Lopez Torres v. New York State Board of Elections. The Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law, together with pro bono counsel, Arnold & Porter LLP and Jenner & Block LLP, argued that New York’s unique convention system -— used by the political parties to select their judicial nominees -— deprives New Yorkers of their right to cast a meaningful vote for trial court judges.

A copy of the (in our unbiased view) excellent opinion can be found here. William Rashbaum's account in the Times is here.

Why is this decision so important? There are many reasons, and we will continue to blog about this in the coming days. But the most simple reason is this: New Yorkers will now have a say in who their trial court judges are. An undemocratic process -- whereby party bosses chose our judges -- seems to have received its death knell.

Categories: General, Judicial Selection

CFE: Unfair Distribution of State Education Funds

Capitol Confidential reports that the Court of Appeals has set an October 10 date for a hearing on the Campaign for Fiscal Equity Case. As many of you know, the Courts have already ruled that certain jurisdictions like New York City have not received their fair share of state education funds, and have ordered the State to distribute such funds more equitably.

But the State Legislature has repeatedly failed to act on a series of rulings in this case. We can't say we're surprised: the Legislature makes a habit of failing to address difficult issues. But the courts have become increasingly frustrated. In fact, in March, an Appellate Division Court ruled that New York City schools should get between $4.7 and $5.6 billion in additional aid in the next five years.

The Legislature still has done nothing. And something needs to be done -- court orders can't be ignored forever. The Brennan Center has submitted an Amicus Brief in the latest round of this case. We'll be blogging more about it in the coming weeks.

Categories: General

No Reforms, No Raise

Fred Dicker in the New York Post writes that Elliot Spitzer insists that legislators shouldn't get a raise until they enact important reforms.

This strikes us as a good idea. In 2004, the Brennan Center issued a report that identified many of the Legislature's failings and made a series of recommendations for improvements. Just prior to the 2004 election, every politician in New York State seemed to agree that reform was needed. And in January 2005, the Assembly and Senate each passed what they called "landmark reform." We were happy that the Legislature responded to the public outcry over the need for reform, but we were a bit more skeptical about the steps it actually took.

We're in the process of completing a new report that looks at how much has changed in Albany since new legislative rules were adopted in 2005. We can't tell you too much about our findings prior to release, but if you know anything about Albany, you can probably guess (hint: not much has changed). If real reforms are going to come, legislators must feel the heat. Conditioning real reform on pay raises may be the right kind of pressure.

Categories: General, Legislative Rules

New York's Voting Machine Choice

Sewell Chan reports on the Brennan Center's usability study of voting machines in today's New York Times. We'll have lots to say in the coming days about this release, but the most important thing is this: of the two types of machines that New York is considering, one -- the full face DRE, or "touch screen" voting machine -- has significantly higher lost vote rates than the other -- Precinct Count Optical Scan, or a machine which allows a voter to fill out her ballot by pen and then feed the ballot into a scanner. The difference is significant. At top of the ticket races (i.e. President, Governor), there is a 1.2% "residual" or lost vote rate on full face DREs, but just 0.7% for Precinct Count Optical Scans. That may not sound like a lot, but consider that there are well over 10,000,000 registered voters in New York. 0.5% represents more than 50,000 votes.

Categories: General, Voting

Legislators Want Voice in Selecting Voting Machines

Legislators in Albany County have asked that their opinions be considered when the Albany County Election Commissioners (who, like county election commissioners around the state will have final say as to what new electronic voting machines are selected for their county) choose new voting machines.

Certainly, we agree with the sentiment that the public should be involved in this process. As we've been mentioning over and over again on this blog, we've already issued a security analysis of the most commonly purchased electronic voting machines, and we've got three more reports coming in the next few weeks: looking at the usability, accessibility and cost of new systems (usability should be out early next week).

Here are some suggestions we have for the commissioners:

Perform extensive usability tests before purchasing machines: this means letting actual members of the public vote on the machines and gauging both their reaction to the machines (did they like them? Did they find them confusing? Were the confident that their votes were recorded accurately? did it take them a long time to complete their ballots?) and whether they made any errors while they voted (we found the correlation between liking a machine and voting error free is not necessarily related -- some voters are confused by the machines and make errors, but don't realize it).

Perform extensive accessibility tests before purchasing the machines: ask the elderly and disabled in your county to use the machines you are thinking about buying. Observe the entire voting process from approaching the voting machine, to making selections, to casting the final vote. And consider how easily people with multiple disabilities (e.g., citizen with both sight and manual dexterity problems) can vote on these machines.

Categories: General, Voting

Member Items and November

We've previously written about member items in Albany: hundreds of millions of dollars of "special legislative grants" for which there is little public record in New York. Can member items take center stage in the run up to elections. At least one candidate seems to hope so: "Philip 'Flip' Pidot, the Republican Party candidate and prospective Growth Party candidate for New York State Senate in the 26th District, has proposed a permanent and comprehensive legislative abolition of “member items” spending in the State Legislature, as well as voluntary disclosure by sitting lawmakers of all prior such spending."

Hat tip: UrbanElephants.

Categories: General

Demanding Change in Albany

Citizens for Better Government in New York is asking New Yorkers to sign an e-petition, which will demand legislators in Albany enact specific reforms. Take a look.

Categories: General

An Argument for Public Financing?

Common Cause notes that less than a quarter of all campaign contributions in the governor's race came from upstate. Does this provide a reason for New Yorkers upstate to support public financing of elections? NYPIRG's Blair Horner says yes: "Campaigns have to be paid for by somebody," he said. "Either by the wealthy and powerful or the average New Yorker... It's better if everyone has a financial stake in the system, rather than just the wealthy few."

Categories: General, Campaign Finance

New York's Disservice to its Disabled Voters

New York 1 reports on the City Board of Election's unveiling of their "ballot marking devices," machines that are meant to allow physically disabled and elderly voters to vote in privacy in November's election -- something that's required under the federal Help America Vote Act (HAVA).

“Whether they have a visual disability or dexterity disability, they can vote on a machine and have their ballot marked using either the audio component of the ballot or a touch screen component of the ballot, or if they need to, use either a sip and puff type device or rocker paddles,” New York City Board of Elections Executive Director John Ravitz said Monday.

Sounds great, no? But there's at least one big problem. HAVA requires one machine for the disabled at every polling place. In New York City, these machines will only "be in place in every borough office for September's primaries and November's election."

That means if I'm disabled and I live in Inwood, at the northern end of Manhattan, I've got to find someway to get several miles downtown -- just so that I can wait in line at the borough offices, with every other disabled person in Manhattan, in order to vote. And remember, I'm physically disabled and/or elderly.

This isn't the city's fault, necessarily. Because the State was so slow in getting its act together in complying with HAVA, it was forced, by lawsuit brought by the Justice Department, to come up with this plan. But any way you look at it, disabled voters are not getting what they should be entitled to by law.

Categories: General, Voting

Taking the State to Task on Voting Machines

In a scathing editorial, the Buffalo News takes the State to task for failing to get its act together on voting machines. The newspaper notes that the State is a year behind schedule. It also faults the State for failing to select a single type of machine for the entire state. Specifically, the paper preferes the optical scan machiness (which requires voters to fill in ovals on a ballot, much the way they would mark an SAT exam, and then feed the ballot into a scanner) to touch screens (which are more like ATMs, in which the voter makes her section by touching the screen).

We don't have a position on whether the state should have mandated one system for every county, but we will say this: we'll soon have another report out that should help election officials decide which system is best for voters.

Categories: General, Voting

Unemployment in New York

Upstateblog also has an interesting rundown of the most recent unemployment data in New York, by region.

Categories: General

Another Take on the Common Cause Report

We've already blogged on the Common Cause report on the abuse of soft money contributions in New York (which are banned on the federal level). Upstateblog takes a look at this report and says among the worst culprits are hospitals and unions.

Categories: General, Campaign Finance

Silver Takes on the Times

Speaker Silver makes a convincing case that the Times takes too broad a swipe at the state legislature for failing to close loopholes in the state's campaign finance reforms. There's no question that the Assembly has repeatedly passed a campaign finance bill that, while far from perfect, would be an improvement over the current state of affairs. For this, the Assembly certainly deserves credit. The same cannot be said for the Senate.

Of course, if the Senate were to pass its own campaign finance bill, it is far from certain -- even then -- that New York would get real campaign finance reform. One of the many reasons reform is so hard to get in New York is that even when both houses pass similar bills, conference committees are extremely rare (unlike in Congress and many other state legislatures, there is no mechanism to ensure that they occur). Without a conference committee -- a public meeting between members of each chamber to hash out the differences in similar bills -- there is no compromise between the chambers (unless Silver and Bruno get together), and no new law to send to the Governor. All too often, the result is that everyone can claim to be a reformer, but no reform actually gets passed.

But the Assembly can make sure one bit of reform does get done soon -- and it can do it without having to compromise with the Senate: Rules Reform. In January, the Assembly can make sure that it adopts new legislative rules for its chamber, to make it more transparent, deliberative and accountable to the people of New York. It can transcribe committee meetings, so that New Yorkers see where their Assemblymembers stand on issues. It can make it easier for bills to get out of committee and onto the chamber floor for debate and a vote, so that there is actual public debate and votes on more issues that New Yorkers really care about. There's so much it can do! -- and none of it involves waiting for the Senate to finally jump on board.

Categories: General, Campaign Finance, Legislative Rules

All White Then

Liz Benjamin notes that, if confirmed, Governor Pataki's choice to replace Justice George Bundy (who had wanted to stay on the court and is African American) will leave the Court of Appeals with an all-white bench for the first time in many years.

Governor Pataki's choice, Judge Eugene F. Piggot, Jr., is currently a Judge in the Appellate Division, 4th Department.

Categories: General, Judicial Selection

The Soft Money Loophole

Common Cause has released a report that reveals yet another way that entities have circumvented New York's incredibly lax campaign finance laws.

"Soft Money" is theoretically provided to political parties for "party building purposes." At the Federal level, soft money contributions are banned. In New York, they are unlimited.

As Common Cause notes, "Parties are not supposed to use [soft] money to support particular candidates, but this legal barrier does not hold up in practice." There have been $53.2 million in soft money contributions since 1999, according to the report.

That's one heck of a loophole.

Categories: General, Campaign Finance

NY Post on Spitzer the Reformer

The New York Post editorial board provides us with their impression of Eliot Spitzer after meeting with him on Wednesday:

Within "30 to 60 days" of his taking office, Attorney General Eliot Spitzer insists, New Yorkers will see evidence of "fundamental change" in Albany.

Spitzer vowed to start fixing the state's "broken politics" from Day One.

The Post notes that if elected, Spitzer is likely to find formidable resistance to implementing the key reforms he highlighted for them, like ending district gerrymandering and ensuring greater transparency. On the other hand, the Post notes, the potential benefits to Spitzer and New York are tremendous:

But if he does break the mold, change the game, end Albany's legal corruption and perverted politics - well, that's something else entirely.

His future, as they say, will be ahead of him.

New York's, too.

Categories: General

Raising and Spending in New York

Senator Liz Kreuger applauds the Albany Times Union for its editorial excoriating the Legislature for failing to close loopholes in the state's campaign finance laws. But, that's only half the story, she says:

Not only are there loopholes in how legislators like myself raise campaign funds, but the rules outlining how those funds can be spent are among the most lax in the country.


Good for her. It's something we've been saying for months.

Categories: General, Campaign Finance

Suozzi's Campaing Finance Proposal

Capitol Confidential reports on Suozzi's recent campaing finance plan:

*Public matching funds
*$2,100 individual contribution limit for all offices
*Ban on contributions to non-candidate committees and political parties by unions, corporations, partnerships and LLCs
*Ban on gifts from all registered lobbyists
*Prohibition on “rolling over” funds from one campaign to another

Capitol Confidential notes that Suozzi himself has "rolled over" funds -- more than $3 million from his county executive campaign committee to his gubernatorial committee.

Categories: General, Campaign Finance

New York's New Voting Machines

Jay Gallager reports in today's Journal News that the State Board of Elections has approved a plan that would allow the State to comply with the Help America Vote Act and purchase new machines by 2007. That's a year behind schedule, and State officials are already warning that they might not even make this new deadline.

The Brennan Center has already issued our security report on electronic voting machines. We plan to issue three more reports on electronic voting machines very soon. Some of it will be particularly relevant to New York. Watch for it. . . .

Buffalo, Ontario?

Buffalo Pundit notes that, for the THIRD TIME this summer, Buffalo residents will be unable to watch a state-wide debate (in this case among the Democractic AG candidates). This is a bit of an outrage, considering how involved Buffalo residents have been in efforts to reform the way New York State government works.

It also seems a little absurd given that Buffalo is, um, you know, the second largest city in New York State.