Elections Professional and Activist
As to the reason why more voters are getting out and voting early, Czarny says it’s something his department is pushing.
“We’ve done a lot of push on making sure that people know that this is a valuable option, that it works and that it’s secure,” he said.
Polls are open 6am to 9pm Absentees must be turned in or postmarked tomorrow Find your polling place and check your absentee status at onvote.net Some polling places have changed since last year. Results will be found at onvote.net starting at 9pm. Get out and vote Onondaga County.
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Dustin Czarny, an election commissioner, said the board had to use a smaller font than usual this year to keep the ballot on a standard 17-inch page. Otherwise, the board would have been required to use a 22-inch paper ballot which it doesn’t keep in stock.
For voters who have trouble reading the smaller type, each polling site will have three options to help: An enlarged sample ballot will be posted on the wall. Free magnifying glasses will be available upon request. And ADA-accessible voting machines at each polling site will allow users to see a larger image.
While this convenience is a nice feature, Commissioner Czarny considers early voting an important safeguard against uncertainties and emergencies on Election Day.
“We have a very busy society. People have more than one job, they have child care, they have elder care,” he explained. “We live in the age of COVID–even though the pandemic has lessened, we still have an endemic of people getting COVID and having to isolate. These are situations that you don’t know will come about. If you wait until election day, you may fall victim to one of these situations and be unable to cast your vote.”
“I’m just hopeful that we are going to see a higher than normal turnout on Tuesday; we are going to see just how many people decided to vote early and whether that affected that, and we will know that Tuesday night,” said Czarny.
I appeared on George Kilpatrick’s YouTube and podcast to talk about the last day of Early Voting 2023. Enjoy.
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Welcome back to #WeeklyWonk. Each weekend I publish an article on a subject relating to elections in Onondaga County and New York State. Often these articles will have detailed stats to consume but sometimes they will be a recap of a prominent issue or on relevant election law. Today is my final recap of Onondaga County before Tuesday’s General Election.
Onondaga County ends the year similar to how it started. As of Friday November 4th, we had 306,698 active voters in our county. Onondaga County overall leans slightly to the left. #8% of voters (116,591) are Democratic, 27% are Republican (82,555), 29% non-enrolled (87,372) with about 6% third party. The City of Syracuse makes up only 23.4% of the county with 71,866 voters. The City of Syracuse makeup is overwhelmingly Democratic with 55% of the voters (39,649) enrolled in the Democratic party, 13% Republican (9,122), 26% non-enrolled (19,168) and 6% third party. Finally, the nineteen towns of Onondaga County make up 76.6% of the voters of Onondaga County and are borderline Democratic. Thirty-three percent of the voters (76,944 are enrolled as Democrats, 31% (73,433) are Republican, 29% are non-enrolled (68,204) and around 7% are enrolled in a third party.
I have been doing heat maps for you all year, but this is my first heat map of our entire county. First, I do a heat map of the individual town and ward registrations. All nineteen wards of the city of Syracuse are rated overwhelmingly Democratic (+20% DEM). The Town of Dewitt is the bluest Town of Onondaga rating in the moderately Democratic category (+ 10-4% DEM). The towns of Manlius and Salina rate in the slightly Democratic category (+59% DEM). Camillus, Clay, Geddes, and Onondaga are rated in the borderline Democratic category (0-4%). Cicero is borderline Republican (+0-4 GOP). Lysander, Marcellus, Pompey, Skaneateles, Tully, and Van Buren rate slightly GOP (+5-9% GOP). Elbridge, Lafayette, and Spafford are moderately GOP (+10-14% GOP). However, I also provided a heat map of all 442 Election Districts in Onondaga County. We have 2 EDs that are actually tied and white, and small EDs with no voters in them that are black. Looking at the ED heat map we can really see the diversity of our home. Most towns have a great deal of diversity in them, and it is beautiful to see.
These are the historical trends for Onondaga County. We can see in 1996 Onondaga County started out as a pretty overwhelmingly GOP county. However, starting in 2004 we really start to see two dynamics starting to work, the GOP started to lose voters dramatically as their aging population was not replaced as voters moved or died. Then in 2008 we saw a dramatic rise in Democratic registrations around the Obama election. Democrats stayed steady as the GOP decreased until 2016. In the wake of the 2016 election, we saw dramatic increases in Democratic enrollment as the GOP plateaued. The non-enrolled though started to make their rise in 2019 and continues, while The Democrats have levelled off. While Democrats have a dramatic raw Democratic voter advantage (+34k) it has not changed much over the last few years. When we look at the Democratic advantage when paired with their traditional allies the Working Families party and the GOP paired with the Conservative party, Democrats have a +9.88% advantage.
As we look toward the 2023 elections it is helpful to look at the results in our county since the last similar election, 2019. In 2019 the GOP won three of the four county-wide seats but the Democrats running for Supreme Court both carried Onondaga County. Since 2019 Democrats running County wide or in districts that has all of Onondaga County in its Democrats have won 17 of 19 races. We can also see that though the changes have leveled off in the last few years, the electorate is dramatically different than in 2019. Democrats have added to their raw voter advantage by nearly 4k voters and partisan advantage by almost 1%. However, the most dramatic increase is the over 12k new non-enrolled voters. In fact, overall Democrats lost .35% and the GOP lost 1.18% in their share of the county population while the N/E have gained 2.78%. The Raw Democratic gains and the unpredictable N/E population will help shape the 2023 election.
That does it for my last look at 2023. Early Voting runs today, Sunday November 5, 2003 9am to 5pm. You can still get an absentee ballot in person Monday November 6th 8:30 to 4:30 pm, and Election Day is Tuesday November 7, 2023 6am to 9pm. Go to onvote.net to get information. I will take a break from the Weekly Wonk as the election will have happened, but ballots and data will still be in flux. Starting two weeks from now I will start to take a look back at the 2023 Election and look forward to 2024. As always you can subscribe to dustinczarny.com to get all content updates and election news below.
“The ballots were already printed and the election was already programmed,” Czarny said.
Should Aslam pull out a victory, the law is not clear on whether he could take office while living outside the district, Czarny said. Onondaga County’s charter specifies that a candidate must be a resident in a district when petitions are filed, which Aslam was. The elections commissioner said he would expect a legal challenge that courts would settle in that scenario.
“These local leaders actually have way more of an impact on your daily life than the national and federal races,” Czarny said. “Your local leaders are the ones who decide how much sales tax you’re going to pay. They pave the roads that you drive on everyday. They determine the funding for public transportation,” he said.
“Early voting grows over time and that’s what we saw in other states,” Czarny said. “When it when it first gets implemented, it starts out small, then people start to trust it. And now the campaigns are really trying to drive people for it, both sides now are trying to drive people towards it.”
https://www.waer.org/news/2023-11-03/early-voting-turnout-strong-in-run-up-to-election-day
Dustin M. Czarny