Elections

Resolutions passed by the council Thursday advocate for no-excuse absentee voting, and would allow people to register with a party up to 10 days before an election.

"For me, voter empowerment and barriers to registration is something I've been working on for nearly a decade," City Councilor Ben Kallos of Manhattan said. "In fact, it's one of the issues that brought me into government."

Meanwhile, the board failed to accomplish what it set out to do at its meeting Thursday: certify the citywide results from last month's primary.

Instead, that was postponed because officials from the Manhattan office failed to show up for the official vote.

The City Council voted Thursday to require the Board of Elections to send voters texts and e-mails telling them when their poll sites change and reminding them of upcoming elections.

Under another bill passed by the Council, BOE will have to set up a website and mobile app to let voters check their registration and party affiliation, and change information like their address.

During April’s presidential primary, many voters had no idea they had been dropped from the rolls or from their party until they arrived to vote. There’s currently no way to check online.

“Tens of thousands of voters showed up to vote thinking they were registered or registered with a political party, only to be told by election workers they were not in the poll books,” said Councilman Ben Kallos (D-Mahattan). “Voters should be able to easily access information about elections at any time.”

As Mayor Bill de Blasio is mired in controversy over his fundraising activities and proximity to lobbyists, the City Council is moving on bills to reduce the possibility of ‘pay-to-play’ campaign financing and make significant tweaks to strengthen an already-robust public-matching system.

The Council’s Committee on Governmental Operations held a hearing on Monday to examine a package of eight bills that would reform campaign finance rules and improve the city’s public matching funds program, which, though it has some critics, is often held up as a national model.

The bills, introduced in November, aim to implement recommendations made by the New York City Campaign Finance Board (NYCCFB) after the 2013 city election cycle. Perhaps most notably, the bills would eliminate public matching funds for contributions bundled by people who do business with the city, provide earlier public matching funds to candidates, and improve disclosure requirements for companies or people that own entities that do business with the city.

A bill by Councilman Ben Kallos (D-Manhattan), discussed at a hearing Monday, would prohibit campaigns from accepting public matching funds off money raised by lobbyists who bundle unlimited contributions from other donors.

By law, lobbyists, contractors and others doing business with the city can give no more than $400 to a mayoral candidate. But a loophole allows those same individuals to bundle unlimited amounts from others to the same candidates.

Something went wrong in that purge, according to multiple election law experts and others familiar with the winnowing process. Amidinvestigations into the New York City Board of Elections and widespread complaints about voters being turned away from the polls on Tuesday, it now seems likely that many legitimate voters were mistakenly disenfranchised.

“This happens every presidential election — the boards all over the state start purging voters,” said City Councilman Ben Kallos, chairman of the committee that oversees the board. Mr. Kallos noted that Brooklyn had historically eliminated more voters than other boroughs during periodic sweeps.

“But this would be the largest number of Democrats who were taken off the rolls in recent memory,” he said.

After flagging voters who do not cast ballots in two consecutive federal elections, the Board of Elections mails notices to determine whether voters still live at the address where they are registered. If no confirmation comes back, a voter can be deleted from the rolls. Board positions are equally split between Republicans and Democrats; each voter removal must be approved by both a Republican and a Democratic employee, according to the rules.

Upper East Side Councilman Ben Kallos holds up a Citizens Committee bag at a City Hall rally yesterday as a majority of the Council have now co-sponsored the Citizens Committee-backed bill to impose a nickel fee on plastic bags.

Over the past two years, we’ve given away nearly 6,000 bags in neighborhood bag giveaways with City Council Members.

Legislation was introduced in the City Council by Ben Kallos (D-Manhattan) this week to increase that to $250 in an effort to stem reliance on big money donors able to give the max.

Many of the donors who have given the max to de Blasio come from the real estate industry, which has an interest in city housing and land use policies.

Under Council Member Ben Kallos’s leadership, residents are invited to cast ballots in favor of funding specific community projects with discretionary money from the city budget. Kallos is a pioneer in the innovative process of participatory budgeting. Less than half of Council Members allow their constituents to actively decide what gets funded.

A new bill being introduced in the City Council aims to make it easier for candidates to get on the ballot without the backing of party machines — scrapping requirements to gather hundreds of thousands of petition signatures.

Under the legislation by Councilman Ben Kallos (D-Manhattan), a candidate could instead qualify by raising enough donations to earn public matching funds — from $5,000 for City Council to $250,000 for mayor.

Under the current rules, candidates have to get between 450 and 3,750 signatures — but upstart office-seekers often face petition challenges seeking to knock them off the ballot.

"We're trying to protect and improve New York's landmark campaign finance program," said Council Member Ben Kallos, chair of the governmental operations committee and prime sponsor on three of the eight bills in the package.