M. Spencer Green / AP
Advocates for voting rights in New York celebrated last week, when the governor signed a law restoring the right for people on parole. Now they say the real work begins.
The bill passed the state House and Senate last month. Governor Andrew Cuomo signed it into law Wednesday, with it taking immediate effect.
Erika Lorshbough is Deputy Policy Director for the New York Civil Liberties Union or the NYCLU.
“The thing we’re really celebrating is that even though there have been opportunities for people to vote since the executive order in 2018, a lot of the time people on parole have not known if they’ve had the right to vote,” Lorshbough said.
Residents hope community grid will reconnect neighborhoods
Photo illustration by Emily Steinberger | Photo Editor, Photo courtesy of Deanna Holland
The state’s budget for 2022 will include $800 million for the estimated $2 billion project.
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When Marie Kearse-Ace was young, she spent her afternoons visiting Wilson Park with her friends, eating at restaurants on Harrison Street and roller skating at the rink on Oakwood Avenue before she was forced to leave.
Kearse-Ace grew up in a house that her grandfather built on Renwick Place, where the parking garage for Upstate University Hospital now sits. In her neighborhood, she recalled grocery stores, hairdressers, youth centers and a sense of community all within feet of her house.
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A not-so-friendly four-legged friend briefly joined the New York City Police Department this year, shocking New Yorkers in viral videos when it was deployed in response to a hostage situation in the Bronx, and later in a public housing building in Manhattan.
The tool – a 70-pound robot made by the company Boston Dynamics that is capable of transmitting video, sound and two-way communication – sparked an outcry about an overreach in the kinds of police surveillance that New Yorkers are exposed to.(The device was first tested and deployed by the NYPD last year.) Police have touted the so-called “digidog” for its ability to evaluate the safety of a scene, such as a hostage situation, and make officers aware of any potential threats before going in themselves.Facing scrutiny of the tool, department officials have countered that robots have been used to assess dangerous situations and diffuse bombs for decades.
New York State Team
ALBANY - Gov. Andrew Cuomo has signed legislation giving people convicted of a felony the right to vote once they’ve been released from incarceration, building on a 2018 executive order restoring the right for many people on parole.
Cuomo s signing of the legislation this week was hailed by criminal justice advocates and legislators who said that barring people from the process harkened back to segregation and continued to disenfranchise people of color.
“With today s expansion of voting rights, we realize a principle that our segregation-era laws have sought to deny: every citizen has equal worth and deserves the right to vote,” said Assemblyman Danny O Donnell, D-Manhattan.
The answer may be a little bit of both.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo has been quick to say the broadband access gap has been closed by his Broadband for All program, though many including state Sen. George Borrello, R-Sunset Bay disagree with Cuomo’s assessment. The governor is looking to boost broadband access by requiring private companies to provide a $15 rate so that low-income residents can have access to broadband internet.
There are pockets of Chautauqua County lagging behind in internet access according to a fall 2020 survey compiled by the state Education Department. The New York Civil Liberties Union recently filed a Freedom of Information Law request for the survey, which showed that more than 165,000 students in New York state (6%) lacked internet access. In Chautauqua County, 1,058 of the county’s 18,353 students (5.76%) had no access to internet. The same percentage of students had no access to a device to access the internet.