Priorities: What would be your top three priorities?
- Change the structure of the NYS Assembly. The NYS Constitution calls for one Assemblyman for each county. Changing back to this structure would downsize the Assembly and eliminate 88 (of 150) Assembly positions; this would also re-establish regional representation (now referred to as local control, and historically as the ‘republic’ structure of our government).
- Change our financial structure: I would push to end budget mandates being handed down to local governments; push for a balanced budget requirement; end unconstitutional abuse of the budget process. To make this possible I would push for a separate line-item veto power for the governor, the Assembly, and the NYS Senate, applicable after the seven or so budget bills have all been separately passed.
- Push for statutes favoring homeschooling & focus public school districts on the effectiveness and efficiencies of their educational offerings. -school budgets are almost equal to the budgets of the city,& town governments
NYS recently enacted many election law reforms, but same-day registration and no-excuse absentee balloting must be passed again by the legislature. Would you support these proposals and are there other election reforms that you support?
Same-day registration & no-excuse absentee balloting is desirable but creates new ballot integrity issues. Physical handling of ballots creates fears of fraud and corruption, double voting, votes being lost, & new votes being inserted. Those issues need to be addressed. I propose an electronic system: Generate a random number, one assigned to each ballot; print it out for the voter to take; re-sort by random number after every ballot cast; and store by random number, not by sequence cast. Upload the results to a statewide database to allow everyone to see the total vote count by election district, etc. Not knowing who cast what vote, one could at least verify their vote was recorded properly. Many suspicions would be removed. With slip in hand, the system could even allow a person to fix their vote if their vote was voided for any reason. This system could quickly expose fraudulent activities (say, election district vote totals did not match the election district’s count).
Would you support efforts to replace the Joint Commission on Public Ethics and Legislative Ethics Commission with a new independent and effective agency? Please explain your response.
I have not had much experience yet dealing with the Public Ethics and Legislative Ethics Commission, but if it is anything like the agencies I have dealt with, there will certainly be room for improvement. I believe the concept of an independent agency is wise. I would support a move in that direction but would proceed cautiously. Everyone has embraced a political Worldview and everyone bases their decision on that Worldview perspective. While creating an independent ethics agency would be a smart move, efforts to ensure equality of treatment would require Rules to be adopted that the independent agency should be required to follow. and its powers should be specifically stated – that it should not be allowed to exceed