NYS Sen. Liz Krueger to Reform the BOE

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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. A little background on the New York City Board of Elections epic fail in its first release of ranked-choice voting results this week. After the drama of the 2020 election, the board was already under unimaginable scrutiny, and why? Remember last year when nearly 100,000 voters in Brooklyn received ballots in the mail with the wrong voters' name on the return envelope?

Well, after that debacle, lots of people were left wondering what would go wrong this year as they rolled out something fairly complicated, ranked-choice voting, and now we know. 135,000 sample ballots got mixed in with around 800,000 real ones for a first pass incorrect ranked-choice tally, which they had to correct the next day. Now we'll talk to someone who's trying to reform the system once and for all. It's New York State Senator Liz Krueger, a Democrat representing Manhattan's Midtown and Eastside communities.

Senator Krueger is the lead sponsor of a bill in the Senate to professionalize the board of elections to ensure that commissioners and staff are qualified and capable of carrying out the responsibilities of their positions. That seems like a pretty basic set of criteria. We'll get her take on a few other things too. Like Krueger was a lead sponsor of the marijuana legalization law.

We'll ask about the pace of progress toward actually opening dispensaries and distributing the licenses to profit off the new cannabis market with racial justice in mind. Welcome back to WNYC, Senator Krueger. Always great to have you.

Liz Krueger: Thank you, Brian. I want to start with a shout-out for Nily Rozic in the assembly, who's my partner on the Board of Election Bill.

Brian: Because you need both houses of the legislature to pass the bill. Democracy 101.

Liz Krueger: Yes, you do.

Brian: How much do you know about how this mess-up occurred on Tuesday? Do you know the names of actual human beings who included the sample ballots with the real ones when they weren't supposed to?

Liz Krueger: No, I don't know if some reporter has broken that story yet but Liz Krueger doesn't know. Liz Krueger just knows that when we started this election, she said, "Something's going to go wrong. It always goes wrong. I can't stand this." Sure enough, I was right. I want to emphasize, this is not the fault of ranked-choice voting. Ranked-choice voting is actually working exactly as we hoped.

None of this is because we moved to ranked-choice voting, and the software work and the voters got it and more of them came out to vote, and they mostly did all the rankings. Please, please, please don't confuse mistakes by humans at the board of elections who should not be working there, with a new system of how we select our elected officers.

Brian: I'll ask you one ranked-choice voting question since you're an advocate of that. I get and I'll repeat just so the voters have it very clear that this was not the problem of ranked-choice voting, this was a problem of mistakes made by people at the board of elections. It's not a systemic problem because ranked-choice voting makes anything more susceptible to this kind of error. Get that.

Here we are, in this complicated moment with Eric Adams and Maya Wiley, and Catherine Garcia, all so close together. The only thing that's going to determine the final winner is when they make the final click on a computer to count the final ranked-choice votes from the absentee ballots. In the old days, meaning 40 years ago, at or until 20 minutes ago, basically, Adams who got the most first-round votes would have a runoff election with either Wiley or Garcia, whoever actually comes in second.

They'd have a runoff election. Person to person, and the voters would get a couple of weeks, instead of seeing all these unmanageable debates with eight people at a time and all of that stuff because ranked-choice voting does produce a larger field of candidates, I think that's what it's supposed to do in part, so people made the best decisions they could. Now the alternative scenario right now would be a one-on-one runoff election, including probably at least a televised debate.

Liz Krueger: About 7% of registered voters ever participated in that. You had a far smaller number of the voting public having a say on who would win that runoff, while here, we had greater voter turnout than we've had, I think in decades and all those people's decisions get factored into the final winner of the primaries. I'll take the greater number of people having a say in a vote at the ballot box as the better punchline personally.

Brian: We did see greater voter turnout than in other recent mayoral primaries and that's an indication. It could be an indication of a lot of things like people got galvanized after voting in the 2020 election, or people got galvanized by the intense circumstances of the pandemic and the racial justice movement this year, but certainly, ranked-choice voting may have inspired more people to the polls. What does your bill propose to change?

Liz Krueger: It's pretty simple. It says government has agencies that do almost all functions of government life and they follow a pretty parallel model. You have someone who has accountability, an elected official, who's hiring people at the top of the agency and if they're not qualified to do their job, they get fired. That's what we want. We want to have-- There are some complications with Board of Election because there's constitutional language that I believe needs to be changed at some point.

That will take longer so we set it up as we have to with the constitution, two co-directors, one Democrat, one Republican, but they will both be chosen through the elected officials at the top of city government and if they don't do their jobs, they can be fired and they will hire staff for the Board of Election. In some scenarios, they need to also be part of the one D for one hour, et cetera, and if they can't do their job, they will be fired.

There will be trainings to make sure that people have the professional training needed to do their jobs and if they can't do their jobs, they'll be replaced. Just like you name any other city agency or state agency and that's the basic model. Here at the Board of Election, we're still dealing with a 19th century model of patronage where 10 unelected commissioners are appointed by county party bosses. Look, I'm one of those two parties, I'm a Democrat, I'm no less guilty than the Republicans for this, but we have a situation where the party bosses decide who will be the 10 commissioners.

They decide who runs the agency. They're the only ones who can get rid of them, but they're not elected themselves and they don't necessarily have any of the right skill set themselves and no one else can insert themselves in the process. Mayor de Blasio gets a lot of crap for a lot of things during his administration, but he's been begging the board of elections to change how they do things. He was begging them to take more money from the city to make sure that they had what they needed to get it right.

Other entities have begged to be part of a more transparent process where consultants can come in, take a look, advise the board how to do things, advise the board how to cross-track and triple-check their numbers before they release them incorrectly to the public. This board of elections just keeps saying, "No thank you, we know what we're doing," and yet every single election, apparently they don't know what they're doing.

Brian: There was the other problem that I didn't even mention from just a few years ago where many thousands of people were wrongly kicked off the voter rows in Brooklyn because they were seen as people who hadn't voted in so long that they weren't really voters anymore but that was a mistake in thousands of cases so a lot of people had to vote with affidavit ballots. I believe that was the Board of Election's error.

There are all these things, each of which is fairly small in a way because I don't think any of them were on purpose, and I don't think any of them affected the outcome of elections, you can dispute that if you think that's wrong, maybe it is wrong, and yet--

Liz Krueger: We'll never know if they affected the outcomes of elections, because-

Brian: Yes, that's fair.

Liz Krueger: -a lot of times you can, I believe with the current systems, be sure of the counts as long as the counts are done correctly, that you can audit. Thank God we have a system in New York State with paper trails and you can audit and you can recount, but you never know if some mistake has triggered people not being able to vote because they're thrown off the voter files or people are refused the right to vote because they show up someplace and are told they're not there in the books, et cetera. There are risks from even not intentional bad actions, but simply incompetence. Incompetence also leads to people not getting their fair right to vote.

Brian: Why do you think it follows that the patronage system of appointing the members of the Board of Elections comes out in the detail work, in the implementation of things getting messed up so frequently? In theory, a lot of people are appointed for political reasons after somebody who they supported won an election, to run an agency, run to this, run to that. They're not necessarily experts in those fields. What they do is then go out and hire experts in those fields to work with them and do the actual work on the ground. Is there something that would prevent the board of elections appointees from doing that like it's done in many other government agencies?

Liz Krueger: I don't think there's any other government agency where there's the reality that the entire top tiers are appointed by the party leaders. Not even the elected officials from specific parties, but the actual what is referred to as the party bosses. I don't know that there is a parallel and I don't know that there's a parallel, but yes, if someone's elected mayor and their best friend helped them become mayor, is there a chance that person ends up in a good job in that administration? Sure, I'm sure that's not really a surprise to any of us, but an entire agency with that storyline, I can't think of one other than the board of election in New York City.

Brian: I think Mary Ellen in Westchester can think of one. Mary Ellen, you're on WNYC, thank you for calling in with State Senator Liz Krueger.

Mary Ellen: Hi, thank you so much for taking my call. This is a topic that I have had quite a lot of interest in particularly over the last few years. I have to say, it's not just a New York City Board of Elections situation, as I'm sure the senator's well aware. One of my questions-- I live in Westchester where people think that we're so advanced, but the fact is and not just Westchester County but in so many counties across the state. There were so many problems with the way the boards of elections operate. That's largely, I have to believe, due to the fact that first, there were no appropriate ethical standards that govern boards of elections.

For example, there's apparently no law in New York State and please tell me if I'm wrong, but as I'm aware, there's no current law in New York State that prohibits the Board of Elections Commissioners from simultaneously being their party chairs or party officers. Major, major conflict of interest there. In terms of election administration, we apparently have no basic election standards and requirements. What I would call elections 101, for example, there's apparently no law that requires timely updating of voter rows and with proper notice, of course, to the people affected. It seems to be pretty much random, sometimes overdone, sometimes wrongly done, sometimes not done.

There has to be state standards for that. There's apparently no New York State law that requires that registered voters be provided with appropriate access to ballot content before they walk into the voting booth. Last year, I called our board of elections, now, I knew what was on the ballot, but not everybody's on top of this. Sometimes it's elections that are not as publicized as say the last mayoral election or the 2020 elections. I called even until the day before the 2020 election and my county Board of Elections could not-- said that the ballot content was not available at the Board of Elections. It's ridiculous, there has to be basic standards. New York State election law needs a major overhaul and frankly, there's really no excuse not to do it. It's just--

Brian: Mary Ellen, I'm going to leave it there for time. That's really great that you gave the listeners throughout the region, this regional perspective on it. Senator Krueger, for you as a State Senator, obviously the state legislature passes laws that can pertain to the whole state. Is this not a New York City problem only, but any County Board of Elections problem?

Liz Krueger: This caller is completely correct and legitimate in her objection. Andrea Stewart-Cousins, the leader of the State Senate has called for hearings for statewide changes in how we want our election. I have been a little focused with the one bill I carry specific to the New York City Board of Election because we have such a history of problems here and I was just so sure we were going to continue to have them. I agree with her completely. We need to be taking a really hard look at revamping many of our state policies and elections.

We've actually been doing that, I think relatively quickly since the Senate Dems took over three years ago, we have passed more law changes on elections than were done, I think for the 50 years before. Every issue that she raised from Westchester, I think is completely legitimate and a pattern of problems we are seeing county by county with some of them being worse, some of them being better. I got to say from what I've heard, Westchester falling into the county's being worse. Thank you to her.

Brian: Mary Ellen, thank you. We'll continue in a minute with Senator Krueger. We'll touch on a few other things with her, including the rollout of the recreational marijuana market. That was her bill in the state Senate as well. Stay with us.

Alison Stewart: On the next All Of It, a new outdoor theatrical production in the meat-packing district, features seven short plays inspired by the seven deadly sins. Director Moises Kaufman joins us along with playwright, Ming Pfeiffer, plus what seashells reveal about our environment. We'll speak with author Cynthia Barnett about her new book, The Sound of the Sea: Seashells and The Fate of the Oceans. I'm Alison Stewart, join me for All Of It, weekdays at noon on WNYC.

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Brian: Brian Lehrer on WNYC with New York State Senator Liz Krueger, Democrat from Midtown and the East side of Manhattan on her bill to reform and really professionalize the Board of Elections after the debacle this week with those sample ballots being announced as actual ranked-choice ballots, only the latest Board of Elections debacle. Let's take one more caller story on this and then we're going to get into another couple of things that you're involved with, or that are going on in Albany. Alex in the Hudson Valley, but who ran for office on Long Island a few years ago, you're on WNYC. Hi, Alex?

Alex: Hey Brian. First time, long time. I ran for county legislator in Nassau a little over four years ago. I was really shocked to see the overlap in campaign staff and people who had or were offered jobs at the Board of Elections. It was basically a revolving door between the campaigns, both on the Democrat, I ran as a Democrat, and on the Republican side. It was used as a way to make sure people had jobs because the campaigns didn't pay them a lot of money and it was also a stepping stone.

You had to do your time at the Board of Elections before you were offered anything interesting in other county offices or in the democratic party offices there. It was really shocking to see, even though I was a Democrat and knew these people, I wanted independent people on the Board of Elections, just because I think there shouldn't be the ability to go back and forth between campaigns and the authority that regulates the campaign.

Brian: Alex, thank you for the story. Very informative. Senator Krueger, you were prime sponsor of The Marijuana Regulation and Taxation Act, which, of course, creates a legal recreational cannabis market in New York State. How's it going? That just passed a few months ago. I think in a lot of states that passed legal weed, it took like a couple of years sometimes before dispensaries actually opened up. How's the early going in New York and what do you see as the biggest hurdles?

Liz Krueger: Well, it is an enormous challenge now that we've passed the bill to implement the bill because I worked on this bill for seven years. When we started out, we thought we were talking recreational adult-use marijuana. By the end, we were talking that plus a major redesign and expansion of our medical marijuana program, plus a major redesign and expansion of our hemp CBD world in New York. I don't even think CBD existed when I started working on this legislation. Suddenly, we finally get a bill passed.

It's being heralded as perhaps the most progressive and far-reaching marijuana cannabis law in the country. I'm very proud of that. I'm very proud of what's in the bill, but it requires an enormous number of now working pieces to come together. The creation of a new state agency, coordination between that new state cannabis agency and our agriculture and markets [unintelligible 00:21:15] cannabis after all of the vegetables that we grow, coordination with our department of health because of the health issues, both for medical and for making sure no dangerous products are being marketed under our legal law.

It's combines with issues with substance abuse treatment because we made a commitment that a significant amount of the money would go to treatment of addiction to more dangerous substances education program so that young people understood what risks were involved with involvement in any drug. I think just keep going, Brian. We have a lot of work to do, and that involves the guns really going off. When the original board has been created with an executive director hired, who will then, of course, be responsible for the hiring of many people to handle many things and we will need to create regulations under the law.

That's what happens when you pass a law. You need regulations that needs to go through a process and then public comment, and then final reg. Everyone thinks that's not how you pass a law and then magically, it gets implemented the next day. Not one like this, not one that's so complicated. We are hoping that the governor will give us some good nominees that we can confirm through the Senate pretty quickly and that then all of this work can take the next step forward.

I always said that at minimum it would take 18 months before anyone was getting licenses and starting to sell legal marijuana in this state. We can potentially get some of the medical expansion done sooner and some of the hemp CBD clarifications done sooner. I still think we're 18 months from actually having licenses distributed for growing and selling adult-use recreational marijuana.

Brian: Okay. Thank you for that update. Another one, almost every week we have calls for the mayor, who's going to be our next guest, by the way, since it's Friday complaining about loud souped-up vehicles, which seemed to be more of a plague since the pandemic began.

I see that the state legislature passed a couple of weeks ago, a bill called the SLEEP Act, the Stop Loud and Excessive Exhaust Pollution Act or SLEEP, which would now only ban the alteration of cars to make them sold out but then the driving of cars, and the drivers would get some [unintelligible 00:24:10] if they were caught doing it.

Are you aware of this bill? What I read in the press coverage was that it passed both houses of the legislature, but there was uncertainty as to whether Governor Cuomo would sign it because he's a car enthusiast.

Liz Krueger: I am aware of the bill. I've voted for the bill. I hope he signs it. I don't know. It's dangerous. I feel like you'll get people calling and going, "Oh, she sounds like my grandmother." Maybe I do sound like your grandmother because maybe I'm old enough to be your grandmother, but it does seems like everybody has lost some of their common sense as they finally climb out of their apartments after the year of COVID.

We see more and more people driving these vehicles in irresponsible ways, purposely taking the mufflers off because they want them to be noisy, taking their license plate off of these motorcycle/scooters/whatever they want to call them, two-wheeled, three-wheeled, riding in the bike lane. They're not electric bikes people. They can't be ridden in the bike lane. No, you can't come down our avenues really at two in the morning 30 and 40 together.

I think we all know this. We're the New Yorkers, we've lived here forever and yet this is becoming a ubiquitous issue in all five boroughs. I hope you will say to the mayor, "Make them stop." I don't know exactly how other than tell us what other bills we should pass but we have to get control of this because it's actually dangerous. People are getting hurt and it is driving people crazy with the noise level in the evenings.

Brian: You don't have a lean on whether the governor did sign or will sign or has reservations about that bill?

Liz Krueger: No, I have not had any discussions with his people. Although I seriously doubt he and his staff are doing wheelies down third avenue in the middle of the night on their two or three-wheeled electric vehicle. If they want a stand there, I can assure them they'll see other people doing it.

Brian: One more. You are sponsoring legislation, I see with Senator Brad Hoylman, who may or may not be the next Manhattan borough president, depending on ranked-choice voting, that would restrict the amount of outside earned income that you yourselves, the members of the state legislature could receive during your terms in office and prohibits certain activities that can create an appearance of conflict of interest. Tell our listeners, because they probably have no idea. What do you make? How much outside income are people earning and what are you trying to restrict?

Liz Krueger: Okay. We make $110,000 now per year in the state legislature. We did away with the Lulus. Some people remember those. We have no restrictions on other income from anywhere of any amount. Both Brad and I for years have agreed that that's the wrong answer. I carried a bill for a while then he carried variation on the bill. There was a commission that has said some of this can't be done, but the commissions come, they go, they get sued, they disappear.

He and I said, "Come on, let's try again. Let's try again to put it into the law in New York." It's not that you can't have other outside income, but you can only have some certain kinds of sources that already your boss resulting in you potentially having conflict of interest between your one set of bosses, the voters and your other potential boss paying you money, wanting something different from you as a legislator.

We took a look at the congressional law about what outside income congress members can have and we said that's a pretty solid law. It does allow for outside income, but it's more like if you have stocks, you can have passive involvement with stocks earning money, but you can't be running companies that you might be voting for or against laws that impact. You can have jobs that don't interfere with the daily working of being the legislator, but those are extremely limited. I think it can only be 15%.

Brian: Those are great examples. We've just got 15 seconds left in the segment. Do you think your colleagues are going to pass this bill restricting their own outside income possibilities?

Liz Krueger: The Senate Dems were by and large in support of this over the last several years so I'm optimistic about the Senate. I'm not in the assembly and there was more deterrence particularly from people who worked as attorneys, and also worked as legislators. To be honest, that's where you got a potential where some real conflicts of interest lie. I'm hoping we can revisit that all again.

Brian: State senator, Liz Krueger. We always appreciate when you come on with us. Thanks a lot.

Liz Krueger: Thank you, Brian.

 

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