#nyelection

Ok y’all. Strap in, this is a long one: ENDORSEMENT TIME. I gathered this from reading a lot of things: posts on local FB political blogs, friends’ posts, lots of interviews and articles, a few voter guides. I wish I could cite my sources better but I accidentally closed my window with all the tabs I’d been saving. I’m less well-cited than usual. I apologize.

The primary is tomorrow, but to participate you have to be enrolled in a party having a primary (aka, the Democrats or the GOP.) If you’re not, and you lean at all to the left, I highly recommend you consider enrolling in the Dems if you want to be directly involved in electoral politics in NYC. New York State has closed primaries, which means that if you aren’t registered as a member of a party, you can’t vote in its primary. But NYC is a Democratic town and the Democratic primary is the de facto election for most city offices. On the one hand: fuck a closed primary! Change the system! On the other hand, if you’re into electoral politics, you might as well participate where the action is.

Don’t know what or who you’re voting for? Go here: http://www.whosontheballot.org.

LET’S SEE WHAT WE HAVE HERE.

Mayor: Bob Gangi, but mostly NOT DE BLASIO: De Blasio, you had such promise. De Blasio, I liked you so much. De Blasio, your housing plan sucks rocks and your financial conduct feels off and you never lived up to your promise and while I agree Andrew Cuomo is a jackass you really lost that fight. But you’re the mayor, and though I wouldn’t be surprised if you lose in the general to some fiscally-conservative-socially-liberal Republican, the Democratic machine chose you. As such, I don’t think any of your challengers are going to win, but I can’t recommend voting for you. I picked Bob Gangi because he’s hella to the left and two young women of color handed me his flyer at the mayoral debate I went to. That made me like him. So vote for him.

Public Advocate: Tish James: I continue to really like Tish James. The Public Advocate is a funny job and is designed to be a power check on the mayor, and I admit I don’t have a great sense of how effective she’s been at this outside of the spin machine which makes her seem pretty great. I wouldn’t be entirely surprised if there is some blog post I can’t find talking about the machinations behind the scene that make her look less rosy, but what I can see I support very much (housing rights, equal pay work, bad landlord lists, etc.) Additionally, the other guy’s campaign is basically “Tish didn’t have an adversarial enough relationship with the mayor, and also I’m a history professor from Columbia and I know things.” He has no elected experience. BZZT. I wouldn’t vote for him even if I didn't like Tish.

Brooklyn DA: Anne Swern: A lot of what I’ve been reading has been marveling at the fact that this DA race is about reform rather than being tough on crime. A lot of this can be attributed to Ken Thompson’s legacy and his move towards more progressive choices around how the DA works and the power the DA has in setting bail, choosing or declining to prosecute, and the options defendents are given. So who’s the best reformer?

 Unlike a lot of people, I like Eric Gonzalez. I appreciate that he comes from a community impacted by policing and the criminal “justice” system. But word on the street is that public defenders don’t like him and he has repeatedly failed to come out against some systematic reforms I think are important (bail, discovery rules, etc.) I don’t think he’s bad but I don’t think he’s the best. Anne Swern is better rated by several progressive orgs, has committed to ending cash bail, and wants to reform discovery rules that currently favor prosecutors. She’s also worked as a public defender, at least briefly, which to me proves she has had to understand and defend the humanity of defendants over the course of her career. I feel unsure about endorsing a white woman over a person of color, given the borough and who is most affected by the criminal justice system, but I think she will be a good progressive voice; the 5 Boro Defenders’ #KnowYourDA committee, which is entirely POC, ranked her highly in their guide.  Why not Mark Fleidner? He just hits every button for me: a far-left white guy with a lot of privilege without a lot of proof of a visceral understanding of how it all goes. Also reports show him as mansplaining/whitesplaining Black Lives Matter to Patricia Gatling, a black woman, and just no.

Civil Court Judges: Consuelo Melendez, Isiris Isella Isaac, Ellen E. Edwards, Fredrick Arriaga, and Patria Frias-Colon. I understand, abstractly, the reason why we elect judges. I don’t think we do a good job of it, though. The above slate is suggested by my genius friend Jen Abrams: (http://mailchi.mp/e46598afcde0/dont-forget-to-vote-on-tuesday-sept-12). She does her own endorsements, including straight SENDING OUT A QUESTIONNAIRE this year, and I trust her judgement. You should trust her judgement too. She goes a lot more into it at the above link, including the complicated politics around this different, better group of “Independent Democrats.”

District 6 Judge: Rupert Barry by a hair, via Jen as well. I’m going with her endorsement; Elena Baron is also a star in the race. I think we’d do well either way. 

City Council Races other than my own: I haven’t paid much attention to the other races, for the most part, but people I trust have - Make the Road NYC, the Arab-American Association of NY, friends who pay attention, Tenants PAC. If you want to vote by endorsements, here’s a big list from the Gotham Gazette. But if you don’t, or you just want someone to tell you what to do, here are the few races where I feel I know enough to weigh in.

District 2: Carlina Rivera

District 5: Patrick Bobilin

District 6: Mel Wymore

District 8: Diana Ayala

District 35: Ede Fox

District 38: Carlos Menchaca

District 39: Brad Lander

District 43: Rev. Khader El-Yateem

Last week, I was a poll worker in the NYC Primary Election. I did it for two reasons: one, because it paid $200 (plus a $100 bonus for attending the training); two, because democracy is a giant bureaucracy with poll workers as its face and I wanted to see the view from the ground.

The training itself was 4 hours with an older white guy who was clearly impeccably dressed in the 70s and had stuck with what worked. He had a PowerPoint and very forcibly emphasized the points that were going to be on the test. We got to see a ballot scanner and a voting booth (cool), talked about what to do if the scanner jams, and spent a lot of time on the BMD (the ballot marking device for people who need physical accommodations to vote.) The test was thorough, but it was open book, and there were a lot of friendly helpers around to assist us when we had questions or were unsure. When I say “assist,” I mean, for the record, tell us the correct answer.

Pollworking in NYC is a 17 hour day: 5am (an hour before polls open) to 10pm (an hour after they close.) When we arrived at 5 we entered into a 1 hour sprint to set up the voting stations, the layout of which is specified by diagrams of justice. Unwrap the ballots! Set up the ED Identification Sign! Prop up the Election Information Holder! There was no briefing ahead of time about what was happening, issues we might be facing, how to handle expected questions. It was a race against the clock. My first voter showed up at basically 6:00:01am, because of course there is always someone like that at the party.

Here’s how it worked. Someone comes in to vote. We look them up by name, which is sometimes easy and sometimes (multiple last names or someone who uses both an English name and a name in another language) it’s a mess since there is no rhyme or reason to how that works except for the thinking of the data entry clerk who entered your name. Democracy, you remember, is enacted by people. 90% of the time, we have you, you sign, theoretically I check your signature but I don’t really check your signature that hard, I give you your ballots, and away you go. 

Sometimes there’s a mistake - these ballots can be confusing - and so we mark your first ballot void and give you a new one. The woman I was poll working with had incredibly shaky hands. She ripped a lot of ballots and so we had to void those and hand out new ones (no shade; she was hilarious, old, and had a lot of stories about how she liked to party.) Pretty straightforward.

But if anything is not right in the voter registration book, we can hand you an affidavit ballot. That’s it. Not there despite thinking you’re registered? Affidavit ballot. Think your party is wrong? Affidavit ballot. Not in the books at all? Affidavit ballot. You can also go to the court in your borough and get a court order to vote, but from where we were there was no way in hell anyone was ever going to go down to the court, wait on line to see a judge, come back, and then vote. So you can fill out an affidavit ballot, in which you give a reason why you think you should be able to vote and it goes into the envelope for affidavit ballots. No one ever explained this form to me so I hope I did it right. At my table, we handed out something like 170 ballots and had another 30 affidavits in the end. The guy running my voting site said temps count them. Of course they do. It’s America!

BUT HERE IS THE THING: THERE ARE A MILLION MORE PARTS TO IT THAN THAT. If someone is marked SHOW ID in the polls, I need to see ID, check the correct box on the registration book, put the right number ID code on the right line (where is this code list? No one mentioned this at first), and initial. If someone votes by affidavit, I log that too. If someone’s signature doesn’t match - if they sign “Sandra Martinez” but their signature is in the book as “S Martinez” - we are supposed to challenge them, meaning they have to sign an extra oath saying they are who they say they are. This didn’t happen. There are tons of tiny details and they don’t really cover it in pollworking class and they certainly don’t remind you as you’re doing the work. You are supervised by a few people who know more, and they clearly do know more but in the way where there is a lot of “oh, that doesn’t really matter” and “don’t sweat it, you can just do it at the end.” I at least caught the part in the manual where it said to log affidavit ballots, so I caught up around noon instead of being stuck writing them all in at the end. 

The nominal point of this system is that it is detailed in order to ensure that everyone has the same experience, and in the name of that the whole system and process is very carefully laid out. Of course those narrow prescriptions don’t cover everything and failure is inevitable. Voting booths should be 5 feet apart, but the whole space we had was only probably 10x50 at most so that was physically impossible. People aren’t supposed to go into voting booths together but of course I am not going to tell a 85 year old grandma that the younger person she arrived with can’t go in with her because of Her Right To Democracy, even though for all I know that person will vote for her. There are an impossible number of rules, and these technical failures are where you put party lawyers with thousands of hours of experience and incentive to win against pollworkers with 4 hours of training and incentive to be nice to people.