Letters

As the officers of the Southampton Town Democratic Committee, we wanted to share some thoughts about the controversial decision to cancel the New York State Presidential Primary.

We understand that there are Democrats who wished the primary to go forward so that their chosen delegates would have more of a say in the development of the party platform. However, there are many circumstances that argue in favor of the decision to cancel the primary.

New York State is constitutionally prohibited from automatically mailing absentee ballots directly to voters. That translates into an onerous process requiring many hands to send out applications, check the applications when returned for validity, and then mail out the actual ballots. So, this is a two-step process.

Approximately 600,000 applications will be mailed in Suffolk County alone, and then, depending on how many completed applications are received back at the Board of Elections, hundreds of thousands of ballots will have to be processed and mailed.

Once ballots are returned, they would be clocked in, sorted and finally opened after the primary vote on June 23. Furthermore, since Suffolk County does not have scanners to do this work, hundreds of thousands of ballots in Suffolk County would have to be read and tabulated by hand, at a time when the Board of Elections does not have a full complement of employees, and social distancing rules are in effect.

We do not want any voters to feel disenfranchised, but the reality is that there is no contest for the Democratic candidate for president. This is not the same as canceling the presidential election on November 3. While the party platform is a worthy aspirational statement of our ideals, it has no teeth unless we elect more Democrats to every branch of government who will then have the power to implement those values.

Similarly, the U.S. Constitution is just a piece of paper, unless there is the political will in this country to enforce it. We have already seen tremendous erosion of the rule of law in the past four years. Instead, let us focus on getting our candidates elected.

This is not politics as usual. This is politics in the midst of a life-threatening pandemic. It makes ultimate sense for us to put safety, health and the well-being of our voters and election workers first.

Gordon Herr

Chair

Robin Long

1st Vice Chair

Andrea Klausner

2nd Vice Chair

Southampton Town Democratic Committee