Empire State Today

Texas and Georgia are catching a lot of criticism over voting law measures critics say are aimed at disenfranchising certain voters, but blue states in the Northeast - including New York - have a history of even greater voting restrictions, according to one study.

Although it's getting better, New York has had far more restrictive voting rules that what has recently been proposed in Texas, Sean Morales-Doyle, an attorney for New York University's Brennan Center for Justice, said in a Politifact article.

"New York has a long history of a not very open democracy, but it is heading in the opposite direction," Morales-Doyle said.

New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo. | governor.ny.gov/

The current voting rights venom is aimed at Texas and Senate Bill 7, which the Washington Post wrote "would have created hurdles for voters of color." NBC News predicted that "Texas' voting bill to support Trump's 'Big Lie' will eventually pass," thanks to a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision.

The National Review called out news outlets and Democrats for misrepresenting SB 7, referring to it as "The Texas Voting Lie."

"The Texas bill is no more a voter suppression measure than the Georgia election law that passed a few months ago, which occasioned outraged accusations of the arrival of Jim Crow 2.0 that ultimately fell flat," the National Review said June 2.

Earlier this month, the conservative Heritage Foundation issued a report that challenged the widely believe notion about voter suppression, under a headline that claimed "Dems Flat-Out Wrong," that voter turnout in 2020 was much higher than in 2016, especially from black Americans.

Critics of the Texas bill and similar measures in other states are more concerned about possible voter suppression in 2022 and 2024, not the 2020 election.

While at least one Texas state lawmaker admits that there are provisions in SB 7 that need "fixing," actual comparison between SB 7 and already-on-the-books voting laws in blue states in the north, including New York, turns up instances in which those states' voting laws are more restrictive than anything proposed in the Lone Star State. 

Meanwhile in Texas, SB 7 effectively died May 31, when Democrats broke quorum and walked out ahead of the bill's midnight deadline.

Walkouts are not unique to Texas. The 2009 New York Senate had a leadership crisis, when lawmakers walked out that chamber in a dispute that idled the Senate for about a month. At the time, the Wall Street Journal referred to the crisis as "New York's Cleansing Coup."

After the Democratic walkout in Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott threatened to withhold pay from the entire state legislature over the walkout by the House and Senate's minority party and announced SB 7 will be revived in an upcoming special session.

Through it all, progressives have maintained a steady barrage of vitriol over SB 7 but they were quiet in 2019 when then New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, as part of his "Justice Agenda," signed legislation that now allows early voting in that state eight days before an election.

SB 7 would have allowed two weeks of early voting, six more days than permitted in New York, according to a Wall Street Journal news story. SB 7 also would have rolled back drive-thru and 24-hour voting, mandated sensitive and personal information such as a state ID or Social Security number for all mail in ballots, and changed the legal burden for voter fraud from “beyond a reasonable doubt” to “by a preponderance of the evidence,” the Walls Street Journal news story said.

New York is one of many states in the Northeast that limits the time in which opponents can rally a base via policies that prevent most early voting, according to an Atlantic piece.

"Democrats who have won election after election in states such as New York, Delaware, Connecticut and Rhode Island have had little incentive to change the rules that helped them win," the Atlantic story said.

In April, the Poynter Institute publication Politifact tackled questions about whether New York’s voting laws are even more restrictive than what another Southern state, Georgia, passed that same month. Politifact found that, yes, at least some of New York's voting laws are more restrictive than Georgia’s. For example, Georgia's laws allow for expansive early voting and no-excuse absentee ballots, the latter of which will be put before New York voters this fall in a proposed constitutional amendment.

Georgia’s new voting law also allows 17 days of early voting, nine days more than in New York. Georgia also started automatic voter registration in 2016, something New York didn’t get around to until this past December.

Georgia and New York both ban certain handouts, such as food and water, to voters at the poll “but New York’s law is more lenient," the Politifact article said. Voting rights advocates have long organized efforts to give away bottles of water or food near polling sites where residents sometimes wait in line for hours to vote, including in black-majority neighborhoods.

"Are New York’s voter laws more restrictive than Georgia's?" the Politifact article said. "In some ways, yes. In some ways, no. But comparing them as they are now leaves out some important context."

Georgia's new law "tightens some rules in the name of security" but also is a “mixed bag with both the potential to expand voting as well as restrict it,” the Politifact article said.

New York's lackluster voting law history, which also includes well-documented corruption in New York City politics - including the longtime politically powerful Tammany Hall - is no secret. In 2003 the often irreverent Gotham Gazette offered a brief history of New York's election laws. In New York from 1820 and until many years afterward, the right to vote was a privilege for white men only, even those who owned no property. It would be many decades before federal law forced New York to extend that right to men of color and women.

In fact, New York voters in 1846 rejected a constitutional amendment that would have extended voting rights to free black men.

A measure that would have extended the vote to women in New York was defeated in 1915, five years before the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution extended the vote to women.

Multilingual ballots were not available in New York City until 1975, despite its long history as a diverse city.

That history notwithstanding, matters are changing for voters in New York. In December, Cuomo signed legislation to allow for automatic voter registration in New York. Earlier this month the governor signed legislation that automatically restored voting rights to convicted felons following their prison release.