New York Times: Why Deep Blue New York Is ‘Voter Suppression Land’

In 2016, when the governor of Ohio was asked why he had signed a bill to limit early voting, he had a simple retort: He pointed to another state that had no early voting at all.

When North Carolina’s governor was sued for cutting early voting in his own state, his lawyers cited that same state as rebuttal.

In each case, the state in question was New York. Deep blue, liberal-ideal New York.

Despite its reputation for sterling progressivism, New York has some of the most restrictive election laws in the nation. It is one of just 12 states without early voting. No other state holds its federal and state primary elections on different days. Voters who want to change their party affiliation must do so more than a year before the election, a rule that famously left Ivanka Trump unable to vote for her father in the 2016 Republican primary. …

Mr. Cuomo and Democrats in both legislative chambers have pushed bills to overhaul the state’s elections for years, but the Republican-controlled Senate had consistently refused to call them to the floor for a vote, despite a declared desire to lift New York’s abysmal voter turnout rates.  …

Still, advocates acknowledged that legislators’ whims were unpredictable, and that the political obstacles could loom far larger than the logistical ones. But they also said that the visibility of many officials’ prior statements would make it politically dangerous for them to backtrack.

“Nothing is 100 percent guaranteed in Albany,” said Susan Lerner, the executive director of Common Cause New York, a government reform group. But she added: “I think it would be very very difficult for people who were elected on the promise that they were going to heed the voice of the voter, to then turn around and just have it be old-fashioned Albany business as usual.”