Czarny asked that lawmakers provide more flexibility in the grants they provide and longer time periods for them so election commissioners can do long-term planning to continually upgrade election infrastructure.
“We are usually one of the least funded departments in our county governments and a lot of times those funds are evaporate even quicker in non-presidential years,” Czarny said. “But we still have several elections that we’re running this year and our costs don’t really go down.”
This week I come to you from San Diego as I am attending the Partnership for Large Election Jurisdictions conference. More on that next week as today I want to talk to you about the party change deadline on Friday February 14th. Yes its Valentine’s Day but its also Fall in love with Your Party Day. I talk about how to change your party and you can go to onvote.net to do it today!
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I participated in a panel in the Joint Legislative Hearing on 2025 Exec. Budget Proposal: Local Government. I along with my good government colleagues from Brennan Center, NYS League of Women Voters, Fair Elections NY, and Common Cause NY argued for direct NY funding of county boards of elections as well as funding the NYS Board of Elections.
My written testimony is below:
Testimony before The New York State Assembly & New York State Senate
Joint Legislative Budget Hearing on Local Government
Tuesday, February 6, 2024. 9:30 AM
Dustin M. Czarny, NYSECA Democratic Caucus Chair, Commissioner (D) Onondaga County
Thank you for letting me testify today. My name is Dustin Czarny, and I am an Elections Commissioner in Onondaga County and the Democratic Caucus Chair of the New York State Elections Commissioner Association. NYSECA represents the diverse sixty-two counties throughout New York State. I am proud of our bi-partisan Election Board system, and this is a model that should be followed nationwide. The Democratic and Republican Commissioners must work together to ensure the integrity of our election system. The built-in checks and balances help NY avoid the partisan battles we see unfolding in other States. Commissioners must find ways to put partisan ideologies aside to meet the needs of the voters.
The Board of Elections has faced many hurdles over the last few years and has risen to the challenge. Since 2019 we have implemented election reforms such as Early Voting, Electronic Pollbooks, Universal transfer of registrations. We have administered one of the highest turnout Presidential elections in modern history. We have revamped a robust system of delivering absentee ballots to voters at the highest volume in NYS history. Implementing a cure system to prevent accidental disenfranchisement of absentee voters over technical deficiencies. We have done all that in the middle of a multi-year pandemic that challenged the very nature of our mostly in-person voting system and put the health of our election workers at risk. While no system that is made up of human workers is without its flaws, our Boards have risen to the challenge, and kept our electoral system afloat in New York.
The Executive budget has many positive aspects which I will detail later in this testimony. However, there are two glaring needs for 2024 that it is silent on: Temporary workers and public information campaigns to service the Presidential Election. At the close of 2023 many counties refused the budget requests of their bi-partisan election commissioners to increase staff. In some cases, they refused to provide adequate money even for the bare minimum to field election inspectors. This has set up a dangerous situation as we head into what may be the highest turnout election in our generation. In 2024 we will be implementing Early Vote by mail for the first time. Other reforms such as online voter registration, pre-canvass of absentees, and expanded Early Voting will experience their first Presidential Election. Increase turnout and registration along with new reforms will tax the resources of many Boards of Elections. We need an additional $10 million Aid to Localities grant to be distributed by the NYS Board of Elections to host counties with the express purpose and permission to hire temporary workers and fund informational campaigns so we can administer an orderly Presidential Election in the fall.
The Executive budget comes a long way for providing the necessary funding for the New York State Board of Elections. This is righting many years of misery when it comes to funding the State Board of Elections. It is a welcome and crucial step as the State Board of Elections will be a vital partner for County Boards. The State Board of Elections will shoulder the burden of Online and Automatic voter registration as well as tracking of our absentee ballots and the Campaign and Public Finance systems. The budget also properly funds the new Public Campaign finance Board and its mission to level the playing field for small donors in New York politics.
In 2024 we face implementing the expansive New York Early Voting by Mail reform in the middle of the Presidential year. This important reform will expand opportunities for voters in this crucial Presidential election. We applaud the Executive budget once again including reimbursements for postage and mailing costs. It is imperative the legislature includes this funding in the final budget. It is unclear how many voters will take advantage of this new reform the Democratic caucus of commissioners looks forward to implementing it.
We have aging electronic poll books that need to be upgraded. The Executive Budget specifically addresses this, and I applaud those efforts. Almost all poll books bought in 2019 at the adoption of Early Voting were sixth generation iPad. While these are still serviceable under the current version of IOS (17), there is a strong likelihood when IOS 18 is released later this year it will no longer support sixth generation iPad. This will not affect the 2024 election but going into 2025 many counties will need wholesale replacements of their fleet of IPad to stay up to date on security enhancements. Having that money allocated in the 2024 budget will allow counties to purchase that equipment for implementation in early 2025.
These annual funding requests will serve the needs of 2024 however we still need to address structural issues to maintain adequate minimum funding for Boards of Elections throughout the state. We must protect our Board of Elections from interference from local elected officials. We need to establish minimum staffing levels tied to voter registration rolls for each county Board of Elections. We need mandates for full-time commissioners as our political calendars demand input and guidance year-round. These guidelines can be established and monitored by our State Board of Elections to maintain the independence we need of our Boards of Elections while assuring that counties and New York State give the vital resources for us to accomplish our mission.
If we can establish these minimums, New York should also establish an annual funding stream to offset some costs of host counties. Make no mistake, the primary responsibility for funding elections rests at the county level. We are not a mandate but a responsibility. However, that responsibility also falls on the shoulder of New York State which sets election regulations and reforms that county Board of Elections must follow. A dialogue about how New York can assist counties properly staff and run the Board of Elections is necessary as we embark on the changes to elections mandated by the State legislature over the next few years. New York is one of a handful of states that does not have annual funding streams for the local Boards of Elections. Doing so would eliminate the need for annual funding requests and allow for long term planning for Boards of Elections as well as bring parity of service to all citizens of New York no matter where they live.
Thank you very much for this opportunity to testify today. I hope that we can count on the legislature’s support in defending our democracy here in New York.
With these statistics in mind, Czarny said New York residents should take advantage of state programs to make voting easier and more accessible in future elections, including by voting by mail and at early voting sites. He also encouraged community members to get involved in the election process more personally, like by serving as polling inspectors.
“You’re doing the work of making sure that the election is protected. And that is vitally important, important and needed. Inspectors are our eyes and ears at the polling place,” Czarny said.
March Village elections are coming soon. February 4-11, 2025 is the independent nominating petition period for those villages. This year Fabius and Jordan are having elections run by their clerk and Skaneateles & Manlius run by the Onondaga County Board of Elections. Check it out.
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“Every election has a six to eight-month lead up period of activity that you have to do to get to that election and we have 4 or 5 elections a year,” Czarny said. “So, we’re always planning for one as we’re setting up another.”
The #weeklywonk is back! About once a week I will write an article looking into the registration and electoral data in Onondaga County. In 2025 This will be a semi-weekly article and switch between electoral results data and registration data on races having elections this year. This week we will start to look back at the 2024 General Election and review the different data pieces from this pivotal event for our county. This week we start off by looking at Alternative voting in the 2024 General Election.
When I talk about alternative voting, I am referring to ways to cast a vote other than showing up and voting on Election Day in the normal matter. Alternative Voting generally comes in 4 main categories: Early in Person Voting, Vote by Mail, Affidavit Voting, and Court Orders. In 2024 we had 231,617 voters of which 51% (119323) voted on election Day. The remaining 49% voted in alternative methods. Early Voting (77,935 34%) led the way, with Vote by Mail (29,026 13%), Affidavit voting (5,128 2%), and finally court orders (205 <1%). Democrats tend to dominate alternative voting, and it was no different in 2024. Democrats made up 39% of Early Voters and 50% of Vote by Mail Voters. Republicans did a little better in Early Voting climbing to 31% but only 21% of Vote by Mail voters. Non enrolled made up 24% of both Early and Vote by Mail voters. 3rd Party voters were 6% of Early Voters and 5% of Vote by Mail.
Early Voting has only been in place since the general election of 2019. Looking at the raw total of Early Voting, the 77,935 Early Voters in the 2024 General Election easily broke the record of both raw vote (59,284) and percentage of the over vote (24.96%) set in the last Presidential election. When making comparisons we should look at similar years in the four-year cycle. We have now had only two repeat years of similar years, 2019 & 2023 as well as 2020 & 2024. In both cases we saw significant increases from the past cycle in terms of raw vote totals. The 2020 to 2024 increases saw a 31.46% increase in raw totals and a 34.94% increase in percentage of overall vote.
We have 10 Early Voting Sites for a general election. Onondaga County started with 6 Early Voting sites from 2019 to 2021 and increased to ten in 2022 and remains to this day. These site numbers represent the minimum Early Voting sites required by NYS law. Over the course of the last few cycles our Early Voting sites have grouped themselves into large, medium, and small volumes which held the same in 2024. The 3 large sites are Dewitt town Hall (13,615 17%), Camillus Fire Station #1 12,348 16%), and Clay town Hall (12,079 16%). The 4 medium sites are North Syracuse Community Connections (10,377 13%), Lysander Municipal Building (8,422 11%), OCC Mulroy Hall (6,194 8%), and Armond Magnarelli (5,261 7%). Finally, there are three small sites Lafayette Fire Station #1 (5,026 6%), Beauchamp Library (2,772 4%), and Syracuse Community Connections (1,841 2%). One of the innovations we used this year was a wait time display on our website which helped spread out the totals and kept our large sites from being overwhelmed as in previous years.
Vote by Mail experienced large volumes in 2024 with the addition of the Early Vote by Mail option which allowed a non-excuse-based ability to vote by mail. This saw a large increase in terms of requests (33.908) and returns (29. 361). This was down from the records in 2020 (68,468 & 57,203) which was skewed due to the COVID pandemic. In addition, the return rate, the number of ballots returned versus request, was 86.59%. This represents one of the largest return rates since tracking started in 2009 indicating an enthusiasm, at least among vote by mail voters, to participate in the 2024 election. The percentage of the over all vote though is hard to compare. Since the pandemic we have had a variety of circumstances and access laws different just about every year. The 12.53% certainly shows a jump from the last few years but a decrease from 2020. We also can see that overall, more voters are using vote by mail in comparing previous cycles. We will have to see how the next four-year cycle goes to truly judge.
2024 was also a record year for affidavit voting in Onondaga County, Affidavit ballots are mainly for voters who are properly registered at one point but have moved or need to correct other information. These ballots are counted after Election Day as they need proper research by the staff of the Board of Elections. This was the highest number of voters (5,403) since we started tracking the data in 2009 eclipsing 2012’s record (5112). It was also the highest number of valid affidavits (5,128) by far also eclipsing the record in 2012 (3602). Finally, it also holds the record of percentage of affidavits that were ruled valid (94.91%) eclipsing 2021’s record (91.96%). The new vote by mail canvassing procedures as well as the increased intensity of a Presidential election is the reason we saw a large increase in volume. New rules and hard work of the Onondaga County Board of Elections is responsible for the high percentage of valid votes.
We track the Vote by Mail ballots and Affidavit ballots that are ultimately rejected by the Onondaga County Board of Elections. For both Vote by mail and Affidavits, when we are able, cures are sent to voters when a ballot is ruled invalid seeking to correct any deficiencies to count the ballot. This data represents the ballots that were not cured and had to be rejected. For Vote by Mail 533 ballots that were mailed were rejected for just a 1.84% rejection rate. The largest set of rejected ballots was 285 ballots that we mailed that had an undeliverable address. This is usually due to Permanent Absentee voters moving and not updating their address. Following that 153 (29%) did not have a matching signature, 53 (10%) were postmarked after Election Day, and the remaining 7% are spread over a variety of small reasons. 27th affidavits were rejected with a rejection rate of 5.09%. 170 (62%) voters were not registered to vote at all, 50 (18%) voted either in person or by mail and the affidavit was rejected, 41 (15%) of the affidavits the voter failed to sign the envelope, 12 (4%) were voters who resided in other counties, and 2 (1%) the voters failed to enclose the ballots.
Looking at voting methods by year we get a great sense at how voters are gravitating towards these new options. Before 2019 New York and Onondaga County were primarily in person on election Day voting states averaging just 4-7% of voters voting by mail or affidavit. In 2019 this immediately jumped to 11.92%. During the pandemic in 2020 still holds the record with 49.93% choosing alternative methods. However, we saw growths in 2021 with 16.23%, 2022 with 26.42%, a slight decrease in 2023 to 20.03%, and grew a great deal in 2024 to 48.42%. It is likely that we will continue to see an increased usage rate for alternative voting. Though there was a slight decrease from the similar years of 2020 to 2024, that could be summed up to the anomaly that was the COVID pandemic. We did see a decent increase from 2019 to 2023 (68.04%).
Unfortunately, alternative voting has been a polarizing subject since its introduction in 2019. Democrats outnumber Republicans statistically in Onondaga County. Thuse it is expected for Democrats to dominate the raw numbers of any voting method. However, with Alternative voting we see consistently that a larger percentage of the overall vote chooses the two big alternative voting methods of Early Voting and vote by Mail. In 2024 we saw a dramatic increase in usage of Early Voting by republican voters (3550%). So much so they eclipsed the rate of Democratic voters (33.94%) when comparing the overall turnout. We saw the opposite in vote by Mail. Democrats took better advantage (16.44%) of the new Early Vote by Mail option than the GOP (6.90%) which grew only slightly.
That is, it for this week’s edition of the Weekly Wonk. Next week I continue my look back at the 2024 as we check in on election Day voting and overall turnout. Check back each week at dustinczarny.com as I examine more aspects of our community.
This week I recap the NYSECA winter convention that was held last week in Albany. I talk about why elections officials from all over NY go convene twice a year to train and learn from our fellow colleagues. I also talk about the first few days of the Trump administration and the effect of some of his executive orders, and pardons, has on voting. Enjoy.
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In this weeks episode I preview the races expected to be on the ballot in 2025. County Legislature, Town races, and the big primaries in the City of Syracuse. I also touch on how the even year legislation is going to effect it if it survives a lawsuit, Enjoy.
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I am back! In this week’s edition I talk about the decisions I have made on when to expect content in 2025 at dustinczarny.com. I also talk about the change in the National and State political landscape. And finally I talk about changes happening at the Onondaga County Board of Elections.
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Dustin M. Czarny 