State Senate to kick off 2024 session with a voting rights package

ALBANY, N.Y. — The first order of business for the Democratic supermajority in the Senate on Monday will be passing a package of voting reform bills, including measures dealing with early voting and absentee ballots.

That’s become a tradition for Senate Democrats, who have started off their year with an election reform package every session since they assumed the majority in 2019.

The conference “is prioritizing democracy,” said Elections Committee chair Zellnor Myrie (D-Brooklyn).

“We’re recognizing that we’re at a time in this country, state and city where democracy is under attack in several ways,” he said. “So we’re going to do the things that the Senate has done for the past six years and try as best as we can to pass laws that open up the franchise; make it more efficient and give everybody their constitutional right to democracy.”

This year’s package includes 10 bills, several of which passed the Senate in the final weeks of last year’s session but didn’t come up for a vote in the Assembly. It's unclear whether the Assembly might change its stance this year.

The Senate bills include a measure to make it a misdemeanor to knowingly tell somebody false information about Election Day in an attempt to suppress their vote; one to create drop boxes for absentee ballots; and another to place congressional and state races higher on the ballot than judicial contests.

There’s also a bill that would let local boards of elections establish additional early voting sites that are only open for a portion of the early voting window.

“We have found that there are some locations that have a lot of people in them just on weekends or in the week — if you think about a mall, or a downtown, or that sort of thing,” said sponsor Rachel May (D-Syracuse).

Authorizing temporary sites at these locations would let boards make more places available without paying for staff for nine days when on “five of those days, no one’s coming,” she said.

The Senate is also planning to pass a bill that would have the state Board of Elections maintain a central database of election results that are currently scattered throughout 58 local boards’ offices.

The database bill was renamed last Thursday after the late John Flateau, who worked as Mayor David Dinkins’ chief of staff, a professor at Medgar Evers College, and, until his death late last month, a member of the Independent Redistricting Commission.

“We unfortunately lost a legend, a giant in voting rights,” Myrie said. “And I’m really looking forward to honoring him in that way to hopefully get that across the finish line in both houses.”

The Senate is also planning to reapprove a resolution that would rescind New York’s support for federal constitutional conventions.

Such a convention would be convened if 34 state legislatures vote in favor of one.

Some Democrats have grown concerned that New York’s votes in favor of a convention from as far back as 1789 could help conservative activists work to convene one in an attempt to curtail the power of government.