New York Governor Cuomo said on the 8th that he will present proposals to reform the voting process in his State of the State address on the 11th, including extending early voting days, not limiting absentee ballot applications to the occurrence of an epidemic, extending the time for voters to apply for an absentee ballot, and speeding up the counting of absentee ballots.
Cuomo said he is proposing legislation to speed up ballot counting by requiring local boards of elections to process absentee ballots as soon as they are received and to begin counting and publishing reports on Election Day, rather than waiting until after Election Day as required by current state law.
Cuomo’s proposal would authorize individual county boards of elections to process absentee ballots as they are received and to begin counting and reporting those ballots on Election Day, rather than waiting until after the general election as required by current law, to reduce the time lag that now occurs.
After the March 2020 outbreak, Cuomo issued an executive order allowing New York voters to apply for absentee ballots to participate in last June’s primary election on the basis of the outbreak, but it took six weeks to complete the count and obtain primary election results.
After that, Cuomo still encouraged voters to apply for absentee ballots to participate in the November general election, but in the end, the postal system could not finish processing millions of mail-in ballots in a short period of time, and many processes in the processing of mail-in ballots could be manipulated, and the fairness of the election was questioned by voters of both parties. For the New York State Assembly seat in the 22nd district, two months have passed since election day in November, and there are still hundreds of disputed mail-in ballots that have yet to be clarified, leaving the election without final results.
New York State Board of Elections Co-Chair Douglas Kellner said this underscores the need to change the process so that votes can be counted more quickly, and that mail-in ballots should be counted as early as Election Day.
Cuomo’s proposal to reform the voting process also includes allowing voters to request an absentee ballot before Election Day, extending it from 30 days to 45 days; and extending the hours of early voting polls from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. on weekends.
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