Foundations of NYC: Class 7 homework
Part 2 / 2 of Civic Research. Election law in NYC.
Ah, okay so for homework 6, I put together a bibliography of resources related to election administration in New York. The most interesting lessons came from digging into the laws governing elections.
Lessons
Voter assistance is encoded into city law. I’ll admit — I’ve literally never thought about voter assistance before, but it does seem pretty important to have an infrastructure to inform and engage voters about elections. Both the City Charter and the Rules of the City of New York have chapters on voter assistance (including establishing a Voter Assistance Commission).
Similarly, NYC has a Campaign Finance Board that I didn’t know about. The surprising thing here is that it’s mandated in the City Charter (Chapter 46); I expected almost all election rules to be “rules” - in administrative law!
The one lesson to rule them all: A lot of election law is at the state level. To start with, a lot of information about suffrage is encoded into the New York State Constitution. There’s more to dig into about how state law defines the parameters of NYC’s elections, but as a start — I noticed that the NYC Board of Elections “about” page mentions that a lot of the body’s responsibilities are mandated by state law. There are also multiple books / manuals online to guide election workers in New York State (but never NYC).
Open questions
Apparently Title 52: Campaign Finance Board of the Rules of the City of New York was repealed and replaced in its entirety… but I’m not sure by what!
It appears that many of the City’s laws on elections are unconsolidated (or, better put, there’s no chapter relating to elections that I found). My guess is that it’s because most laws governing elections are at the state level. But I still need to confirm — why isn’t there a chapter on election law in the NYC Administrative Code?
A bonus topic to look into — NYC’s Board of Elections is apparently very ineffective. One reason for this is encoded to State Law - the law dictates that the NYC Board, unlike other local Boards of Election, will have 10 politically appointed commissioners . The State law doesn’t explicitly mention that the 10 appointees will be 5 Democrats and 5 Republicans so I still need to confirm where that’s dictated
History of the issue
So here are the important bodies / agencies I identified related to elections in New York City:
Within the City: NYC Board of Elections; NYC Campaign Finance Board; NYC Voter Assistance Commission
Within the State: NYS Board of Elections
A few dates of interest related to these agencies:
1974: NYS Board of Elections established in the Executive Department
“as a bipartisan agency vested with the responsibility for administration and enforcement of all laws relating to elections in New York State”1988: NYC Campaign Finance Board established through the Campaign Finance Act in response to corruption scandals
2010: In response to Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission, “Voters overwhelmingly approve an amendment to the NYC Charter that requires independent expenditures in city elections to be disclosed and reported to the NYC Campaign Finance Board”