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The Private Sector Must Stand Up for Voting Rights; Here’s How


polling sites private must sector

Voting (photo: Michael Appleton/Mayoral Photography Office)


We are in the midst of a Republican-led national campaign to restrict voting. According to the Brennan Center, 18 states have already enacted 30 laws this year that will make voting more difficult. The federal government has the ability to pass national laws to mitigate the effects of many state-level restrictions, such as the “For the People Act” and the “John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act.” But due to the lack of a clear majority for both bills, we cannot wait for the federal government to act. We must mobilize the private sector to counteract the effects of restrictive voting policies.

Across the country, laws have been enacted that restrict voting access by shortening the hours of operation of poll sites, reducing the number of drop boxes available for completed absentee ballots, preventing the distribution of water and food to voters waiting in long lines, purging voter rolls, preventing proactive outreach regarding absentee voting, and more.

The private sector can and should work to mitigate the effects of these policies. Companies should commit to policies advanced by Time to Vote, for example, which mobilizes CEOs and private company leadership teams to pledge that employees will be given the time they need to cast their ballots. More specifically, companies big and small must offer paid time off to vote. This can be done in many ways: allowing for late arrival to work or early departure from work in order to cast one’s vote without penalty and with pay; educating employees internally about local elections, deadlines to register to vote, time frames to conduct one’s vote, etc; facilitating the ability to register to vote on site in the workplace; and more.

The beauty of such policies are many. First, working to counteract barriers to vote is nonpartisan, and thus does not politicize the workplace. Second, there is an interest convergence at play. If the need for voting rights and election integrity are essential to the operation and preservation of our democracy, the private sector has every interest in preserving these rights. Our democracy has created the greatest economy the world has ever known. Private companies operate within and benefit from the stability and integrity of our democracy.

And let’s be clear that this is also about racial justice. Restrictive voting measures disproportionally disenfranchise racial minorities, and in fact, are insidiously designed to do just that. Those corporations that do not take a clear stand against racial injustice and enact policies to further justice and equity are on a sinking ship as the demographics of the country change and as younger generations demand some level of socio-economic activism from private companies.

The distortion of our democracy as reflected in less participation by racial minorities threatens the sustainability of our democracy, and the environment in which private companies can achieve prosperity.

So what can be done on an individual level? Talk to your employer about programs like Time to Vote. The fact that nearly 2,000 companies across the country have signed on to the pledge gives it legitimacy, and will allow your company to be in the good graces of many other reputable firms. Demand that your company and other large, national firms do not donate to candidates at the local, state, or federal level that do not protect voting rights. Speak out on social media about the importance of the private sector when the government fails to protect our rights.

And remember: none of our rights to participate in our democracy are safe until all of our rights to participate in our democracy are safe.

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Natalie Diaz is Chief of Staff at Time Equities, Inc.

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Voter Privacy Violations Will Continue Until Government Acts to Fix Them


NYC voters voting boothVoters at the polls (photo: Michael Appleton/Mayor's Office)


Voter data reporting laws must provide for voter privacy. Our elections are some of the most secure in all of the world, and at a time when voter confidence faces threats from false claims of fraud, it’s all the more important that voter data be held in a secure way. As cities and states seek to enhance confidence in their organizational competency and the validity of elections, statutes demanding access to auditable public election records are increasingly commonplace.

Election data is a public good because it allows any interested person to double check ballot tabulations and conduct useful research on voter behavior. But without sufficient data security provisions, releasing voter data risks our protections guaranteeing the right to cast a secret ballot.

New York City just experienced such a lapse. Three researchers used two publicly available data sets and two lines of code to identify how 378 voters voted in the 2021 primary elections. As The New York Times recently reported​​, the disclosure included high-profile voters that expressed their dismay at the invasion of their privacy.

We are those researchers. Our ability to identify these voters and their choices does not rely on any hyper-technical skills, it was based on simply knowing where to look and how to expose data privacy lapses in a straightforward way. Other people, with a variety of reasons in mind, can and will be able to do the same thing in elections moving forward unless governments act to shore up their data practices. Fortunately, the technical solutions are easy to implement. The political solutions, however, must be addressed first. 

On August 18, 2021, the New York City Board of Elections released vote records for the June primary election. The records released from the first ranked-choice voting election in New York City are called the cast vote record (CVR). Each CVR lists the ranked choices each voter cast in the Democratic or Republican primary election as well as the Assembly District (AD) and Election District (ED) for each ballot. To keep voter choices private, a de-identifying step is taken in which CVRs are associated with numerical identifiers rather than voter names before they are released publicly.

But, in some AD/ED voter locations only one person showed up to vote in the election. In those cases, we were able to use the New York State voter file (obtained through a standard Freedom of Information Law request) to check which registered voters participated in the election at all. The voter file contains the data on which voter participates in which election, but nothing about individual choices. However, when there is only one voter who turned out for a particular party in a particular AD/ED, it becomes clear who voted and for which candidates in each election. 

Given this alarming lapse in voter privacy we contacted the New York City Board of Elections hoping to point out the error and suggest a simple-to-implement technical solution. 

We spoke with the BOE and brought this issue to their attention through a phone call with a bipartisan delegation from the board as well as the BOE General Counsel, Hemalee Patel, on September 13, 2021. The BOE was aware that this problem may arise but the representatives noted that we were the first research team to find it and bring it to their attention. They indicated that this voter privacy problem is a result of the reporting requirements that mandate the board makes the data publicly available in a certain format, with no flexibility to group single-voter AD/EDs. According to the BOE, this problem can only be corrected by a change to the New York City Charter or New York State Law.

The solution to this privacy issue is not to restrict the data sources employed in our analysis. These data sources -- both the CVR and the New York State voter file -- are integral to evaluating the performance of elections. The CVR is necessary in order for people to audit the Board of Elections and its tabulations, while the voter file is necessary for voting rights groups to ensure that districts are drawn fairly and equitably to ensure proper representation, among other reasons.

If the voter file is restricted, it will effectively only be available to political parties, super PACs, interest groups, and political campaigns due to their special access and ability to pay. Instead, if data reporting requirements are changed to require very low single-voter AD/EDs to be bundled with neighboring AD/EDs, this identifying operation becomes nearly impossible in cases where pooled voters cast votes for different candidates. Similar measures are taken by the Census Bureau every ten years in order to protect privacy in rural areas and in small city blocks, where random “noise” is injected into the data or entries are swapped between geographies or bundled so that small, singularly identifiable entries are not released. 

Similarly, the solution is not to end the practice of ranked-choice voting. While this came about through the results of the election, there is nothing preventing us from conducting this same operation in an entirely different system, whether it be a traditional plurality system or an alternative system such as approval voting, single transferable vote, or a party-list voting. The issue is the data reporting requirements, not the data itself.

It is our hope that by raising this issue we may better protect the privacy of voters in New York City, and voters around the United States. When issues of voter data and privacy are involved we need more than elected officials and appointed bureaucrats at the table — academic researchers, lawyers, voting scholars, and election administrators must be involved as we formulate and implement government policy on voter privacy. 

This operational fix would be incredibly simple from a technical standpoint and would not cost the New York City Board of Elections any more than a few minutes of staff time. But importantly, it would protect the privacy of these voters, who cast their ballots under the good-faith assumption that their privacy is protected by law. The City Council or the State Legislature needs to act so that boards of elections can implement better data stewardship practices in the future.

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Lindsey Cormack is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the Stevens Institute of Technology. Jesse T. Clark is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Electoral Innovation Lab, Princeton University. On Twitter @DCinbox and @electionclark.

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An Assignment for the Federal Government: Tackle Student Debt and Expand Educational Opportunity by Doubling Pell Grants


fordham alumni fclc

Students graduating (photo: Bruce Gilbert/Forham Alumni)


For nearly 50 years, the Pell Grant has been the centerpiece of federal student aid, helping individuals most in need of financial support to attend the college or university of their choice. Pell Grants help more than 370,000 New York students and their families afford a college education every year. They are proven to be the most effective and equitable investment the federal government can make in students. Simply put, investing in Pell Grants tackles student debt head-on. 

However, the federal government has not made a meaningful increase to Pell Grants in well over a decade. In the interim, colleges and universities have worked hard to pick up the slack, but the challenges of inadequate funding persist.

New York’s private, not-for-profit colleges and universities are doing their part to make higher education more accessible and affordable by providing more than $6.4 billion in financial aid each year to students of all income levels. In fact, 66% of students who attend New York’s private, not-for-profit colleges and universities come from families earning less than $125,000 a year. Despite best efforts from institutions, the affordability gap has become a greater barrier as Pell Grants have remained stagnant. The federal government must step up and do its part. 

The time for Congress to act is now but lawmakers should not pick winners and losers by only investing in students at some colleges. Doubling the maximum Pell Grant to $13,000 is the fairest and most efficient and equitable way for Congress to provide higher education funding to all students who need it. Doubling Pell Grants would enable thousands more students, at both community colleges and four-year colleges, to receive the college education of their dreams while reducing student loan debt.  

This investment would have sweeping benefits for students throughout New York and across the nation. Congress has the opportunity to make a critical investment in our students and the social and economic wellbeing of the country itself.

Pell Grants were overwhelmingly successful when first introduced in 1972 because they covered a significant percentage of college tuition costs for students. However, the cost of high-quality higher education has risen and Pell Grants have not kept pace. Doubling Pell Grants is the most effective way to restore that balance and offer more students a sizable financial aid grant that provides meaningful help with college costs. 

The Biden Administration has laid forth a tremendous opportunity for students in New York and across the country to receive an affordable college education of their choice. Doubling the Pell Grant should be Congress’s top higher education priority. It should be accomplished immediately, and certainly by the program’s 50th anniversary on June 23, 2022.

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by: Lola W. Brabham, President, Commission on Independent Colleges and Universities
Henry C. “Hank” Foley, President, New York Institute of Technology
Miguel Martinez-Saenz, President, St. Francis College
Father Joseph M. McShane, S.J., President, Fordham University
Laura Sparks, President, The Cooper Union

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