New York Democrats Look to Advance State Voting Rights Act

* Reposted from Gotham Gazette. Written by Ethan Geringer-Sameth (photo: NY Senate)* 

With the failure of federal voting rights legislation this month in the U.S. Senate, advocates in New York are redoubling a push to pass a sweeping state bill that would shore up voting protections for historically disenfranchised groups.

Legislators introduced the John R. Lewis New York State Voting Rights Act in 2020 to fill at the state level some of the holes left in the federal Voting Rights Act after successive defangings by the U.S. Supreme Court in the past decade. The bill would enshrine a range of protections against voter dilution, require language access, and give the State Attorney General preclearance authority over potentially-discriminatory voting policy changes. But it has not yet advanced in either house of the Legislature.

Governor Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, supported the concept in her State of the State agenda earlier this month but did not include it in her Executive Budget last week, setting the stage for negotiations over the next several months and tempering optimism about the bill's prospects for passage in the current legislative session, which runs until June. That same month, New Yorkers will vote in state and federal primaries.

In a statement last week, State Senator Zellnor Myrie, who chairs his chamber’s elections committee and sponsors the bill, called the failure in Washington "an insult to all Americans, especially to Black and Brown voters who are most often targeted by discriminatory and racist state laws."

For entire article visit: gothamgazette.com/state/11048-federal-inaction-new-york-democrats-voting-rights-act