New York voting questions need answers

Posted 8/21/12

At a hearing about whether some 137 voters in Thompson had a right to vote in the recent election for town council, the lawyer representing the candidate who is challenging the vote said his client …

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New York voting questions need answers

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At a hearing about whether some 137 voters in Thompson had a right to vote in the recent election for town council, the lawyer representing the candidate who is challenging the vote said his client was actively “dissuaded” from filing the challenges by the Sullivan County Board of Elections (BOE).

It’s understandable that the BOE is weary of all the ballot battles the county has seen in recent years. The BOE is small, and their resources have been overtaxed by these repeated challenges. But the challenges raise fundamental questions that need to be answered, because the question of who is allowed to vote is the very foundation of a democracy, and in recent years there have been very real differences of opinion about who is qualified to vote.

The cleanest and easiest way to settle the question would be for the state legislature to strengthen the voting laws with more specific voter definitions that the governor could sign into law. But that would doubtless offend one or more groups of powerful constituents, and is not likely to happen.

Absent legislative action, the only path left to settle the matter is to push the battles through the courts one election at a time, and for better or worse, Sullivan County has been the site of multiple voting battles in recent years.

In 2009, the BOE determined that voters registered with bungalow colony addresses in the Town of Bethel could not vote, and that decision was not appealed.

In 2013, Judge Stephan Schick ruled that voters who lived in and owned seasonal co-ops in Cochecton could not vote; the Appellate Court later overturned that decision and said those part-time residents could vote, and that changed the result of an election.

In 2014, 90 voters who registered to vote in Bloomingburg failed to answer subpoenas to explain why they should be able to vote. In that case Schick called developer Shalom Lamm’s effort to register Hasidic voters an attempt to “stuff the ballot box.” In a later election in Bloomingburg, the BOE determined that some of the challenged voters were not eligible to vote, yet, incredibly, agreed to allow their votes to be counted anyway.

Now, in the 2015 election, 137 voters gave their local addresses as various closed bungalow colonies in the Town of Thompson, and they asked the BOE to mail their applications for absentee ballots to a single Post Office box in Thompsonville, which, according to the discussion in the November 12 hearing in the Sullivan County Courthouse, was taken out in the names of the owner and the manager of the Raleigh Hotel.

The facts in this latest case are not yet known—for instance it is not known if the voters have access to the bungalows or have ownership participation, or if their belongings are stored in the bungalows from one year to the next. But the residents of the county and the state deserve to know with clarity and certainty who is allowed to vote in this county and who is not.

If a person stays at a bed and breakfast for two months, and decided to book that same room in the same B&B for the rest of his or her life, is that person eligible to vote in the county in the next election or not? As a newspaper that has been covering election issues in the county for a long time, it might be reasonable to assume that we could answer that question, but we can’t because the election law in the state is too vague.

A reader will find this sentence in just about every case in the state regarding the right to vote: “The Election Law defines ‘residence’ as ‘that place where a person maintains a fixed, permanent and principal home and to which he [or she], wherever temporarily located, always intends to return.’” The Appellate Court has said a seasonal co-op with the water turned off in the winter is a “principal” home for voting purposes, if not a primary one.

With this unique definition of residence at the core of the question regarding who should be able to vote, it is not only expected by inevitable that the courts will be asked to step in and settle the voting challenges.

It is the duty of the county legislature to ensure that the BOE has sufficient resources to mount a robust response to any and all voter challenges. It would also be helpful if those who clearly committed or clearly intended to commit voter fraud were prosecuted, which would likely lessen the burden of future voter challenges.

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