There were five propositions on the back of the ballot in New York. If you didn’t know about them, you might not have turned the ballot over and voted. Apparently 11% of voters didn’t, although it’s unclear whether they didn’t know or chose not to vote. Two of the propositions related to issues that have generated extreme outrage elsewhere, in the red sort of states where some focus their cries of voter suppression, like Georgia and Florida. As New York is safely blue (except when it isn’t, as was learned in Nassau County), few seemed to take notice.
For months Democrats have been arguing that it’s too hard to get a ballot in America, so Congress must step in to keep the electorate from being suppressed. New Yorkers apparently don’t agree, since they soundly rejected two big ideas that Democrats want to impose on the whole nation via their other voting bill, H.R.1. The first is same-day voter registration. New York’s constitution says updates to the voter rolls “shall be completed at least ten days before each election.” A ballot measure to delete that provision failed, as of the latest numbers, 58% to 42%.
The proposition was to allow same-day registration to vote, because it would be too hard to register in advance of voting day. The substantive argument is that same day registration creates a plethora of issues about how poll workers are supposed to determine voting eligibility at the polling place. Or do they just let people sign a paper that says they’re eligible and vote? The argument there is that we have no serious voter fraud, so why not trust people? After all, it’s a civic right.
The proposition was defeated by 16%. It wasn’t for lack of clarity, as plagued other propositions on the ballot. This one was perfectly clear to anyone with a basic ability to read. This one addressed an issue that was argued in a great many editorial and op-eds. This was a basic tenet of those supporting voting rights and against voter suppression. And it crashed and burned.
New York’s constitution also reserves absentee voting for people who are genuinely “absent” or unable to appear “because of illness or physical disability.”
As it turns out, voters think absentee ballots are called that for a reason. They decided to keep the constitutional limitations, 56% to 44%. On both of these ballot measures, 11% of voters left the question blank. Yet they were rejected by large enough margins, according to the unofficial results Wednesday, that even if all the undecideds had voted “yes,” it wouldn’t have made any difference in the outcomes.
This, too, has been the subject of enormous discussion. Mail-in voting. Why not? It was never the law in New York, which only permitted absentee ballots for those who were, in fact, absent, but this proposition would have enabled everyone to vote by mail just because they wanted to, no excuse needed. And it, too, crashed and burned.
There was very little (by which I mean none) discussion about these ballot initiatives in advance of election day. Plenty of candidate flyers were sent out, telling us how awful the other person was and how they were going to destroy the metaverse, but nothing about changes to the state Constitution, to voting rights.
Perhaps the assumption was that these issues were so widely discussed already in connection to voter suppression in red states that it was time blue states cleaned up their own act and didn’t maintain voting laws that were just as bad, if not worse. Perhaps the proponents of these measures took for granted that the good blue citizens of New York would see these changes for the goods they were, and would obviously vote to make voting more effortless so that more people would vote. More people means more democracy, or better democracy, or so the platitude goes.
Yet, it didn’t happen. It wasn’t even close.
One explanation for this defeat was that the city voters didn’t bother to turn out for this off-year election, secure in the knowledge that Eric Adams would crush Curtis Sliwa as mayor, and thus the proposals were defeated by upstaters. Why they voted against the proposals wasn’t entirely clear, but they aren’t known to be as sophisticated as city slickers.
The progressive feedback loop in Washington and online has convinced itself that Democrats are waging a grand civil-rights battle against vote suppressors. As usual these days, the Democratic Party is out of step with their non-progressive supporters. This is the same with state voter-ID laws, which the Democratic bills in Congress would undermine, despite their broad popularity.
It appears that there grand civil-rights battle is being fought in red states, and that a great many Dems support the proposition that states that vote red need to make voting more effortless so that more presumed Democratic voters will turn the state purple, if not blue. There is no basis to argue that we have a massive voter fraud problem in this country, even though the seeds of doubt have now grown into mighty willows in some fertile Trumpkin minds. And yet, both New York propositions failed.
Perhaps the explanation isn’t about voter turnout in the city as opposed to upstate. Perhaps it isn’t that people believe that Georgia and Florida are, in fact, trying to game the vote for the sake of overturning an election should Trump fail to be re-elected come 2024. Perhaps it didn’t need a lot of advance warning and argument to let New York voters know that their state laws were just as bad, if not worse, than the ones that outraged them down south.
Voting is a right, but a civic right. One that needs to be exercised, and the act of exercising one’s franchise, of registering to vote, of the inconvenience, even difficulty, of going to a polling place to vote, reflects a belief that people who are too lazy, unwilling or disinterested to make the effort have made their own choice. If they can’t be bothered to register, can they be bothered to learn who the candidates are and what they stand for? And if they have no clue who they are voting for or why, do they really contribute anything to democracy?
As questioned before, there is a difference between voter suppression and voter facilitation. How far should we bend over to make it easier, effortless, to vote? For voters who take the time to learn the issues, know the candidates, think about their vote, do they really want their vote to be canceled out by someone who can’t be bothered to get off their couch? Maybe the New York defeat of these propositions was a message that a little effort is the least people can do to exercise their civic right to vote.
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