- In an unprecedented move, New York has canceled its Democratic presidential primary — originally scheduled for June 23 — amid the coronavirus pandemic.
- The Democratic members of the state's Board of Elections voted on Monday to nix the primary.
- New York will still hold its congressional and state-level primary elections on June 23.
- The chair of the New York Democratic Party, Jay Jacobs, has said that the cancellation of the state's presidential primary would mean a lower expected turnout and a reduced need for polling places.
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In an unprecedented move, New York has canceled its Democratic presidential primary — originally scheduled for June 23 — amid the coronavirus pandemic.
The Democratic members of the state's Board of Elections voted on Monday to nix the primary. New York will still hold its congressional and state-level primaries on June 23.
Commissioner Andrew Spano said he had pondered at length, reaching a decision just Monday morning. He said he worried about potentially forcing voters and poll workers to choose between their democratic duty and their health. While there will still be other offices on the ballot, Spano reasoned it made sense to give voters an opportunity to choose in contested races but not to "have anyone on the ballot just for the purposes of issues at a convention."
The chair of the New York Democratic Party, Jay Jacobs, has said that the cancellation of the state's presidential primary would mean a lower expected turnout and a reduced need for polling places.
"It just makes so much sense given the extraordinary nature of the challenge," Jacobs said last week.
Local election officials and voting groups have called on the state to use federal funds to purchase cleaning supplies and protective gear and to boost staff ahead of the 2020 elections.
Both the state's Democratic Party and Gov. Andrew Cuomo have said they didn't ask election commissioners to make the change, which can happen because of a little-known provision in the recently passed state budget that allows the New York Board of Elections to remove names of any candidates who have suspended or terminated their campaign from the ballot.
The decision to cancel a state-level Democratic primary is left up to Democratic state election commissioners. New York accounts for 274 pledged delegates in the Democratic nomination process.
Cuomo had previously issued an executive order canceling several June state legislative special elections and the special election for the borough president of Queens, according to City & State New York.
Sen. Bernie Sanders announced on April 8 that he had suspended his campaign. In a letter on Sunday, a lawyer for the Sanders campaign, Malcolm Seymour, asked the commissioners not to cancel the primary.
"Senator Sanders has collaborated with state parties, the national party and the Biden campaign, to strengthen the Democrats by aligning the party's progressive and moderate wings. His removal from the ballot would hamper those efforts, to the detriment of the party in the general election," Seymour wrote in the letter, which was obtained by The Wall Street Journal.
Board Co-Chairman Douglas Kellner said the primary cancellation was a "very difficult decision," but noted state law allows for removing candidates from the ballot when they have suspended their campaigns, as Sanders has done and, further, endorsed presumptive nominee Joe Biden.
"That has effectively ended the real contest for the presidential nomination," Kellner said. "And what the Sanders supporters want is essentially a beauty contest that, given the situation with the public health emergency that exists now, seems to be unnecessary and, indeed, frivolous."
Sanders' camp, however, blasted the decision as undemocratic and unfair to voters. In a Monday statement, senior Sanders advisor Jeff Weaver called the BOE's decision "an outrage," and "a blow to American democracy," noting that neither the DNC nor the Biden campaign requested the cancelation.
"Given that the primary is months away, the proper response must be to make the election safe – such as going to all vote by mail – rather than to eliminating people's right to vote completely," Weaver said, calling for New York to lose all its delegates if the Board doesn't allow Sanders on the ballot.
And Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, who served as one of the Sanders' most prominent surrogates during his campaign, called the decision "completely wrong" on Twitter.
"Again: NY is still holding primary elections on June 23rd. This decision does not change the fact that people will still be going outside to vote,"she wrote. "If NY doesn't want to risk possibly millions of ppl voting in-person, we need to mail everyone a ballot. Not an application for one."
While Sanders suspended his campaign, he is still staying on the ballot in Democratic primaries and collecting delegates to be able to influence the party's platform at the Democratic National Convention, scheduled for this summer.
In addition to formally selecting a presidential nominee, Democrats convene several important committees at the convention to vote on the party's official platform and policy priorities. For Sanders and his representatives to have a spot on any of those powerful committees, he needs to earn 25% of all pledged delegates allocated throughout the Democratic nomination process. And an inability to compete for any of New York's 274 delegates could be a big blow to his efforts.
Already, Sanders could lose up to a third of his delegates because of DNC rules that require statewide delegates earned by candidates who dropped out to be reallocated to candidates still in the race, according to Josh Putnam, a political scientist who's an expert on the Democratic nomination process.
Former Vice President Joe Biden has 1,280 pledged delegates compared with Sanders' 947, according to estimates from Decision Desk HQ and the University of Virginia Center for Politics.
New York will be one of the many states expanding absentee voting in the coming months because of the pandemic.
While New York law requires voters to have a documented excuse to vote absentee, Cuomo essentially waived the requirement by issuing an executive order that adds the risk of getting COVID-19 as a valid excuse.
Cuomo also recently announced that the state would send absentee-ballot applications with prepaid postage to registered voters to make it easy as possible for New Yorkers to vote from home.
Jacobs has said that it's a significant change but that the party is ready.
"It's a big process for us. We don't have many weeks to get it into place before the primary," Jacobs said. "It's going to be difficult to execute, but we're going to do it."
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