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Here's to 'Frivolous' Elections
New York has set an all-time record for cancellations over the past eight weeks. Elective surgeries, conferences, athletic events, religious observations, parades, graduations and more simply stopped happening. Thousands of COVID-19 deaths—and the risk of more—have justified these sacrifices, and the increasing numbers of jobless and hungry in our city make it awkward to complain about them.
The governor by executive order last week cancelled the planned June 23 special elections for several offices, including Queens borough president and a vacant City Council seat in Brooklyn. The state Board of Elections decided Monday to cancel the presidential primary scheduled for the same day. While Congressional primaries will still occur in several districts, the move reduces chances for disease transmission at polling places because most voters won't have a contest to vote on.
The special elections will shift to November. The presidential primary will never occur. Even though their candidate has left the race, Sen. Bernie Sanders' supporters were upset because they'd hoped to use the primary to amass more delegates and strengthen their hand in fights over the party platform. The co-chairman of the state Board of Elections, Douglas Kellner, dismissed that desire: “What the Sanders campaign wanted is essentially a beauty contest that, given the situation with the public health emergency, seems to be unnecessary and, indeed, frivolous.”
COVID-19 is an extraordinary threat that might justify the extraordinary step of cancelling an election. Still, it's a little frightening to hear an election official describe as “frivolous” the desire by some voters to exercise their franchise to achieve a political goal. That's what all elections are for, and there's danger in letting officials decide when democracy is, in their view, valuable enough to occur.
Democracy is often inconvenient. Our elections are characterized by expensive voting operations, long-shot candidates, low-turnout contests, write-in votes and other inefficiencies. Voters often show up at the polls to check the box for a candidate they know will not win in order to send a message, or demonstrate loyalty, or express other sentiments that are their fundamental right even if they don't strike the rest of us as strategically sound, or even rational. And it's easy to shrug off races for lower-profile offices, like borough president or Council, but doing so means millions of voters living for months without elected representation. That matters.
When crisis strikes, we accept measures we normally wouldn't. Some of those changes persist even after the crisis fades. They become part of the baseline; we digest them without notice. Postponing or cancelling democracy should never go down easy.
Stay healthy,
Jarrett Murphy, executive editor
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