In an effort last year to expand voting access, Gov. Kathy Hochul (D-NY) signed a bill moving the state’s local elections, including towns, villages, and counties, to even-numbered years, which an election attorney now claims will “nationalize local elections.”
“It really hasn’t even gotten the attention within New York that I would have thought it would have gotten because, again, this is a monumental change to the electorate,” Joe Burns, a Republican election attorney, told Fox News.
The Democratic-proposed bill, approved in December, aimed to align local races with state and federal elections to “promote a more inclusive democracy,” Hochul said in a statement after signing the legislation. However, the new law could subvert the state’s local elections, causing candidates participating in those local elections to focus on national topics rather than local ones due to federal and state elections simultaneously taking place, Burns told Fox News.
While the law doesn’t go into effect until 2025, New York’s Onondaga County Republicans who strongly opposed the bill are already planning to sue the state, voting this month to approve $100,000 in funds claiming that the legislature violates local rules, Fox News reported.
Chairman of Onondaga County Republican Legislature Timothy Burtis blasted the new law to Spectrum News, claiming the state’s overreach was their effort to break down Onondaga County’s “independence without due process.”
“That’s really the big issue,” Burns told the outlet. “The state constitution provides tremendous protections for how they organize themselves. Meaning, that the state simply can’t come in and require that these local offices — county executives, county legislators — require that they truncate their terms, require that they then elect the officers on even years.”
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Burns said that because the new law does not apply to elections governed by the state’s constitution like city, sheriff, or district attorney elections, including New York City, it has not received the attention it deserves. He wrote his concerns in a letter last week to Onondaga County, ahead of a vote to approve funds, supporting the lawsuit and saying that this change was overall “bad” for democracy and local governments.
“Candidates in these races for local office — races where candidates might raise and spend as little as a couple thousand dollars in an entire campaign cycle — will be forced to compete with candidates in multimillion-dollar contests for voters’ attention,” Burns wrote in the letter. “Local concerns will be silent; local politics will be nationalized.”
