More than 60 million Americans have already voted early and another 100 million will cast ballots by Tuesday as interest and engagement and participation mount in the closely fought presidential contest (and whatever else is on the various ballots). Even people who have always sat out elections and never registered are jumping in, showing up to be counted for the first time.
But not in New York State, where it’s too late to vote for millions of eligible citizens who haven’t filled out the registration paperwork. The state Constitution has a lousy anti-voter provision in Article II, Section 5 saying in just 12 words: “which registration shall be completed at least 10 days before each election.”
So unless you acted by last Saturday, the very first day of early voting, tough cookies. Half of the states, many heavily Democratic and many strongly Republican, don’t have such a time limitation and permit same-day voter registration. New York should have been in that group and could have been.
In January 2019, after the Democrats took control of the state Senate in Albany, they joined with the Democratic majority in the Assembly and approved a very simple constitutional amendment to delete the dozen words. As there is no partisan advantage in making it easier for people to vote, the tallies in both chambers were bipartisan, with some Senate Republicans and Assembly Republicans joining in.
Two years later, in January 2021, when the Legislature did the required second passage, the GOP backers had stopped being backers, as the Republicans had similarly moved away from their near unanimous support for no-excuse absentee ballots, another good government constitutional amendment. But nonetheless, both amendments won their second passage and were placed on the November 2021 general election ballot for ratification by the public.
The two voting improvement amendments should have easily passed that fall, but, of course, the Dems got greedy and also tried to jam the redistricting process with a third constitutional amendment to permit gerrymandering. It was an outrageous affront against fair play and it caused the Republicans to launch an advertising blitz urging a NO vote.
The NO vote campaign was correct and the flood of TV ads happily defeated the gerrymander amendment, but unfortunately also rejected were the same-day registration and the no-excuse absentee ballots measures. The Dems, in trying for a naked partisan gain, had set back important reforms.
Universal access to mail ballots has been achieved by legislation, and just upheld by the courts, but the 10-day requirement on registration remains in the Constitution and there’s no alternate way around that one.
The Legislature must try again with the same amendment and this time don’t play political games. The Republicans will not waste their money to blanket the airwaves against same-day registration and it should be approved by the voters.
Just think, perhaps four years hence, during the next presidential election, when interest in voting is at its peak again, citizens in this state will actually be able to register whenever they want, even on Election Day, and not be shut out of the democratic process, like they are now.
Wouldn’t that be nice?
