COMMENTARY
Rod Watson: Democrats rely on voters with amnesia
Give our Democratic state senators credit. The last thing I expected, after the debacle they call the budget, was an effort to give more angry residents the chance to vent at the polls.
In the wake of outrage over tax and fee hikes, over raises for their staffers and over their plans to open new and improved (read “bigger”) patronage offices across the state, you would think they would be the last folks going out to promote suffrage.
Yet here they are in Buffalo today, holding a public hearing on bills to make it easier for more people to go to the polls.
Not that holding a hearing necessarily means much.
One of the recent times that state legislators held a hearing here was in 2006 to address financial abuses of the poor outlined in a Buffalo News series. And we all know what resulted from that forum— nothing.
The difference this time is that Democrats— or at least three Democratic men—control all three branches of government. That eliminates, for the first time in memory, the charade of one house passing a reform bill that it knows the other house will never pass, and then blaming failure on the obstructionists running the other chamber.
After proposing reforms and holding today’s hearing from 10 a. m. to 1 p. m. in Erie County Hall, Democrats will be on the spot to move the bills—and this is a good first step.
“Extraordinarily significant” is how Barbara Bartoletti, legislative director of the League of Women Voters of New York State, describes the proposals.
The most significant would put New York among the states that allow same-day registration and voting. Because it requires a constitutional amendment, it would have to pass not just this Legislature, but also the next one before reaching the ballot. Once enacted, it would remove the roadblock that disenfranchises people who get interested when a campaign heats up but who find that, by then, they’ve already missed the registration deadline.
Another would push back deadlines for changing party enrollment, allowing more people to vote when a primary catches their interest. And a third calls for an an educational campaign to let ex-offenders know that they can regain voting rights once they’ve completed their sentences.
“They are not window dressing,” Bartoletti said of the proposals, adding that the League has been pushing such reforms for years.
Still, she noted, “the proof will come if [Democrats] have the political will” to actually pass the bills now that they have the power.
Democrats typically favor making voting easier, while Republicans oppose it. Both act not only on principle, but on the assumption that such changes might entice to the voting booth more minorities and the poor, both of whom tend to vote Democratic.
But given the anger that has spread across all demographic groups this year, that’s no sure bet anymore.
So the pols get points for gumption, if nothing else.
If I were a Senate Democrat, I’d be telling people that the next election had been canceled due to the budget crisis, not inviting more of them angry over the budget to come out and vote. Pushing these bills is like bringing rope to your own hanging.
On the other hand, psychologists say victims of trauma often try to erase the event from their memory.
So the Dems may be banking on the fact that by the fall of 2010, taxpaying voters—the new ones as well as the old —will have forgotten all about what happened to them in the spring of 2009.
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