Election integrity in New York?

over the past 20-something years, election integrity has become a hot-button issue in our country.

In 2000, Democrats claimed that George W. Bush was an illegitimate president because of hanging chads in Florida.

In 2016, Democrats alleged that Donald Trump stole the presidency by secretly colluding with Russia. And in 2020, many Republicans asserted that the presidential election was rigged, which was the catalyst for Jan 6.

None of the claims in any of those elections were proved, but what is clear is that the past twoplus decades of such baseless allegations on both sides of the political aisle have taken their toll on voter confidence on our electoral process. A study in 2000 found an average level of public faith in national elections between 1964 and 1996 of 70 percent. In 2020, a Gallup Poll found that just 59 percent of Americans were very or somewhat confident in U.S. elections.

So you might think it would be government’s main priority to restore faith in our electoral process. Unfortunately, your assumption would be incorrect, and your faith misplaced. Instead, the desire to secure power consistently outweighs restoring public trust in our elections, and common-sense election reforms supported by the public are consistently rejected. A 2021 Monmouth University poll found that 80 percent of Americans support requiring voters to show photo identification to cast a ballot, but Democrats consistently reject that idea. Despite the requirement of photo IDs for everything from library cards to driver’s licenses to accessing Medicaid to boarding an airplane, Democrats, incredibly, claim that requiring voters’ photo IDs would disenfranchise a portion of the population.

Even more concerning, political parties appear to be passing laws that are fundamentally changing our election process — laws that are designed to place a heavy thumb on the election scale in favor of one party over the other.

For the past five years, New York has been a one-party state, with Democrats controlling the Assembly, the Senate and the governor’s office. In that time, Democrats have passed election law after election law not to strengthen and depoliticize state and local elections, but rather to give a blatant advantage to Democratic candidates.

In 2014, then Gov. Andrew Cuomo and other Democrats supported a state constitutional amendment, passed overwhelmingly by the public, that established a Redistricting Commission to independently draw up the state’s political maps to avoid gerrymandering, beginning in 2021. At the time, Republicans controlled the Senate.

When 2020 rolled around, Democrats were in full control, and their desire for that independent commission was gone. They rejected its proposed legislative maps, and tried passing a law to allow