Hiram Alejandro Durán/THE CITY
When Sheila Lewandowski moved to Long Island City in the late 1990s, she appreciated the “sense of space and light” in the western Queens neighborhood, once defined by factories, warehouses, and a mix of blue collar workers and creative types like herself.
Now, high-rise buildings erected over the last decade have cast shadows on everything beneath them and the explosive growth of neighborhood residents is also remaking the political map.
Her City Council district, where 20 candidates vie to succeed term-limited Jimmy Van Bramer, has seen
voter registration soar, with 22% more Democrats and 18% more total voters eligible to vote in this June’s primary than the last citywide Council election in 2017.
Written by Common Cause NY
Common Cause/NY and a group of New York state lawmakers are demanding the New York State Board of Elections (NYSBOE) reject the certification of the ExpressVote XL a touch screen voting machine that would allow voters to mark their ballot electronically instead of on the traditional voter-marked paper ballots later today. The NYSBOE is expected to hear public comments on the machine and then vote to either certify or reject them after.
Cyber security election experts almost universally pan the touch screen technology, so much so that most states have switched back to voter-marked paper ballots. The ExpressVote XL, which uses Windows 7, is also about to become even less secure as Microsoft announced last year that it will no longer be providing software updates for the program. The machine also only prints ballot verifications in English, violating New York State Election Law. The Daily News editorialized against these machines.
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Democrats can claim many firsts among the newly elected members of the state Legislature. Jabari Brisport of Brooklyn is the first openly gay Black man elected to the state Senate. Zohran Mamdani and Jenifer Rajkumar, both of Queens, are the first South Asian Americans elected to the Assembly. Fellow freshman Khaleel Anderson of Queens, 24, is the first member of Generation Z to serve in either chamber.
Two other Democratic firsts also loom large following the 2020 elections. State Sen. Samra Brouk of Rochester, who now holds the seat vacated by retiring GOP state Sen. Rich Funke, is the first Black female state senator elected upstate. Voters in an adjoining district chose state Sen. Jeremy Cooney, who now holds the seat formerly occupied by retiring GOP state Sen. Joseph Robach, as the first Asian American state senator from north of New York City.
was born and raised.
Residents in these neighborhoods face inordinate environmental health burdens. In 2012, Bushwick had more than twice as many avoidable asthma hospitalizations than Brooklyn did as a whole, according to a city report. Brownsville, where 78% of residents are Black, has the highest adult asthma rates in New York City.
“There’s always been disinvestment in our communities,” Rodriguez says. “This is just gonna make it worse.”
Street closures in Bushwick during National Grid’s North Brooklyn pipeline phase four construction in Brooklyn. Photograph: Erik McGregor/Getty Images Since October, Rodriguez has participated in a series of protests against the project, led by the No North Brooklyn Pipeline Coalition and Frack Outta Brooklyn. The movement received a flurry of media attention earlier this year, when activists effectively shut down construction on the pipeline by chaining themselves to the site, resulting in the arrest of five protesters.
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There’s an old curse: “May you live in interesting times.” And boy, did 2020 prove why it’s such an awful thing to wish on somebody.
On paper, 2020 was 12 months, just like any other year. But let’s be real, it felt more like a decade, at least. January was a lifetime ago, back before social distancing, Zoom parties and entire countries shutting down. Those times are but a distant memory, with photos of maskless crowds like relics of a time long past. The biggest story at the beginning of the year – the impeachment of President Donald Trump – was just the first chapter in the epic saga that has been 2020.