12 JUNE 27, 2019 RIDGEWOOD TIMES WWW.QNS.COM
The shameful apathy of Queens
Public defender Tiffany Cabán
says she won Tuesday’s Queens
district attorney primary. Her
main opponent, Queens Borough
President Melinda Katz, trails by
1,200 votes and says the margin is
narrow enough for her to wait for a
full count of all votes before making
any concession.
We won’t know the winner of this
race until on or about July 3, which is
when the city Board of Elections will
begin counting paper ballots cast in
the race. However, we do know for
certain that the borough once again
lost — not because of the choices
cast at the ballot, but because so few
Queens voters chose to cast a ballot
at all.
Sure, Caban voters turned out in
large numbers in the northwest, and
the “establishment” that supported
Katz couldn’t get out the vote in the
same volume elsewhere.
Even so, based on the unoffi cial
count from the Board of Elections,
about 11 percent of registered
Queens Democrats participated in
this election. Approximately 85,447
ballots had been scanned as of
EDITORIAL
Tuesday night, and if you factor in
about 3,400 paper ballots left to be
counted, that brings the total to just
shy of 89,000.
Eighty-nine thousand votes
cast in a borough with 2.3 million
residents and some 766,117 active
registered Democrats, according to
the state Board of Elections, in a race
to determine who will be the next
guardian of law enforcement in this
borough.
This is shameful!
Don’t tell us that you didn’t know
about the election.
We wrote weeks of stories about
the race online and in print. The
candidates took out ads in print,
online, on social media networks,
on television. There were televised
debates on local news channels and
even on our own Facebook page.
Mailboxes across the borough were
inundated with flyers from the
candidates touting their credentials,
slamming their opponents and
urging people to vote on June 25.
And yet, when June 25 came, just 11
percent of the borough’s Democrats
bothered to show up and vote in
the fi rst contested race for Queens
district attorney in nearly three
decades.
New York City and state are fi nally
making a real eff ort to boost turnout,
including the approval of early
voting (to come later this year) and
a new law that mandates employers
give their workers paid time (up to
3 hours) to go out and vote. Still, the
apathy persists.
The Board of Elections must
institute further reforms to make
it more convenient to vote, such as
same-day registration at the polls, a
vote-by-mail system similar to one set
up in Oregon and a later deadline to
change party affi liation (currently,
if you want to change your party,
you have to do that more than a year
before the next general election).
Regardless of what the Board of
Elections does, all of us must fulfi ll
our duties and responsibilities as
voters by participating in elections
when they are held.
There are two popular adages
circulated around election time:
“The people get the government they
deserve,” and “If you don’t vote, then
don’t complain.”
For Queens, we indeed get the
government we deserve, and because
we don’t vote, we shouldn’t complain
about the end result.
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ESTABLISHED 1908
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