'Voter Suppression Land': Why Deep Blue New York Has Challenges

In 2016, when the governor of Ohio was asked why he had signed a bill to limit early voting, he had a simple retort: He pointed to another state that had no early voting at all.

When North Carolina’s governor was sued for cutting early voting in his own state, his lawyers cited that same state as rebuttal.

In each case, the state in question was New York. Deep blue, liberal-ideal New York.

Despite its reputation for sterling progressivism, New York has some of the most restrictive election laws in the nation. It is one of just 12 states without early voting. No other state holds its federal and state primary elections on different days. Voters who want to change their party affiliation must do so more than a year before the election, a rule that famously left Ivanka Trump unable to vote for her father in the 2016 Republican primary.

“New Yorkers would be aghast if anyone accused New York of voter suppression,” said Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union. But, she said, “the antiquated nature of our laws and the failure to enact any common-sense reforms for years puts us kind of in voter suppression land.”

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