New Yorkers have become much too accustomed to civic embarrassment. You’d think the state would cringe to see that it came in fourth from the bottom in voter turnout in last week’s midterm election. Only 28.8 percent of eligible voters showed up, a level of indifference that the Editorial Board called “shameful” in this morning’s editorial. That’s the lowest turnout for a gubernatorial election since the state began keeping records.
But minimal participation has been a fact for years, and now it’s taken for granted. In 2012, the state was 44th in the country in turnout, and that was in a presidential election year. Many voters went through the usual tired calculation: The state’s going to vote for President Obama anyway, I don’t care about any of the other races, and why walk a few blocks out of my way to the polling place when there could be lines and broken machines and election workers who don’t know what they’re doing?
The low turnout is a major reason for the state’s distinguished history in sending crooks, machine politicians and incompetents to Albany. Many of those incompetents like the system just the way it is, and have resisted all attempts at reform, because any improvements might just succeed in bringing more annoying voters to the polls. More voters mean more scrutiny, the least welcome commodity in any state capital.
Earlier this year, Democrats in the Assembly passed a bill that would have made voting much easier, and almost certainly would have increased turnout. It would have established a 15-day early voting period for general elections, with eight days for primaries. People could vote on weekends or any day that’s convenient for them, eliminating the excuse that they were too busy to vote.
More than 30 states have some form of early voting, which has proved popular everywhere it’s been tried. (And it would make life easier here on the editorial board. Every time we criticize a state like Ohio or North Carolina for cutting back on early voting, someone calls us hypocrites for having no early voting days in New York.)
The bill died, as so many hopes do, in the state Senate, which is controlled by Republicans. The leaders there sounded the usual hollow objections: it’s too expensive, too complicated, we don’t really need it. The most Albany of all explanations came from Dean Skelos, the Senate Republican leader, who raised the frightening possibility that a voter would cast an early ballot for a candidate who is then arrested just before Election Day. Yes, that could definitely happen, but around here it’s more likely the candidate would be arrested after being sworn in.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo supported that bill, and spoke up for early voting in his 2013 State of the State speech, nearly two years ago. But there’s no mention of early voting in this year’s book of campaign pledges. About as close as he comes is a promise to tweak the state’s voter registration system, closing registration 10 days before an election instead of the current 25 days.
Although that would give more time to register, it’s not going to substantially alter the state’s miserable turnout. Early voting would, and so would a mail ballot system, like the ones that have substantially increased participation in Colorado, Oregon and Washington. But if the state’s most powerful official has given up trying to change the system, presumably because he’s absorbed with higher priorities than improving democracy, then it’s a good bet New York will remain at the bottom of the list for many years.