{"id":107831,"date":"2020-11-09T01:18:12","date_gmt":"2020-11-08T22:18:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/entire-nys-elections-regime-needs-overhaul-suffolks-bellone-says\/"},"modified":"2020-11-09T01:18:12","modified_gmt":"2020-11-08T22:18:12","slug":"entire-nys-elections-regime-needs-overhaul-suffolks-bellone-says","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/entire-nys-elections-regime-needs-overhaul-suffolks-bellone-says\/","title":{"rendered":"#Entire NYS elections regime needs overhaul, Suffolk’s Bellone says"},"content":{"rendered":"

“#Entire NYS elections regime needs overhaul, Suffolk’s Bellone says<\/strong>”
\n<\/p>\n

\n The movement to overhaul New York\u2019s patronage-driven election agencies is gaining steam.<\/p>\n

One of the state\u2019s most powerful county executives is pushing for a new law to professionalize all of the Empire State\u2019s election agencies \u2014 not just the much-maligned New York City Board of Elections.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s not just a New York City problem,\u201d Suffolk County Executive Steve Bellone told The Post.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe had people at Suffolk polling sites waiting in line for four hours during early voting. That\u2019s unconscionable.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Democrat \u2014 who heads the most populous county outside of the city \u2014 said he waited in line for an hour and 40 minutes at a polling site in West Babylon on Election Day.<\/p>\n

Like in New York City, the county elections commissioners in the rest of the state are selected by the local Democrat and Republican party leaders \u2014 and they have great sway over hiring of full-time employees and seasonal poll workers.<\/p>\n

Bellone said the election boards should be placed under the state\u2019s merit-based civil service system like other government agencies so hires aren\u2019t just installed by party bosses as favors.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s long overdue that we reform our election boards. They shouldn\u2019t look like an old Tammany Hall patronage operation,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cThese are good-paying jobs. Any resident should have an opportunity to get a job. That doesn\u2019t exist right now.\u201d<\/p>\n

He added, \u201cWe want to make sure people have full confidence in the democratic process. If we don\u2019t have confidence in the electoral process, we are undermining democracy.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bellone said he will be talking to other county executives, Gov. Andrew Cuomo, state lawmakers and Mayor Bill de Blasio about making election reform a top priority in the 2021 legislative session.<\/p>\n

Cuomo and de Blasio have both called for changing the city elections board\u2019s administration after voters waited in line for hours during the nine days of early voting.<\/p>\n

The mayor himself waited three-and-half hours to vote at his Brooklyn polling site because the city BOE botched the administration by providing an inadequate number of early voting sites, equipment and staffing to process the flow of voters.<\/p>\n

Bellone\u2019s call for statewide reform got a receptive ear from the elections committee chairmen of the Democrat-led state Senate and Assembly.<\/p>\n

\u201cEverything should be on the table next session,\u201d said Brooklyn state Sen. Zellnor Myrie, who chairs the election panel.<\/p>\n

\u201cWith record turnout and unprecedented attention to our democratic processes, voters expect a world-class democracy and it\u2019ll be important for us to have a robust discussion on what that looks like all across the state.\u201d<\/p>\n

Assembly Education Committee Chairman Charles Lavine (D-Nassau) agreed.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re going to take a look and see what we can do to make things better. We want to make changes so it\u2019s not difficult to vote. The better the process, the better the product,\u201d Lavine said.<\/p>\n

The NYC BOE struggled managing the elections amid the coronavirus pandemic, particularly handling an unprecedented number of absentee ballots.<\/p>\n

Election officials were forced to resend 100,000 absentee ballots to Brooklyn voters after its printing vendor provided the wrong return envelopes.<\/p>\n

City election officials also caught flak for printing thousands of mail-in ballots with a typo, which confused voters who believed they were sent ballots for military service members.<\/p>\n

During the June primary, the agency disqualified more than 80,000 absentee ballots, nixing many of them for technical reasons that were often the BOE\u2019s own fault.\n <\/p><\/div>\n

\n

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Source<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“#Entire NYS elections regime needs overhaul, Suffolk’s Bellone says” The movement to overhaul New York\u2019s patronage-driven election agencies is gaining steam. One of the state\u2019s most powerful county executives is pushing for a new law to professionalize all of the Empire State\u2019s election agencies \u2014 not just the much-maligned New York City Board of Elections….<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":107832,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/nypost.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2020\/11\/SteveBellone.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&w=1200","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[70897],"tags":[79201,69441,5042,72997,4953,32681,70652,71165,71166],"class_list":["post-107831","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-11-8-20","tag-2020-election","tag-bill-de-blasio","tag-board-of-elections","tag-new-york-city","tag-politics","tag-reforms","tag-steve-bellone","tag-suffolk-county"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/107831","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=107831"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/107831\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/107832"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=107831"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=107831"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=107831"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}