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I voted this morning.
I voted because, well, it would feel wrong to skip an election merely because there wasn't anything significant on the ballot. In Manhattan, we had a handful of uncontested judgeships (one "vote for up to four" with a total of four candidates, and one "vote for up to three" with a total of three candidates) and the statewide ballot question, an extremely minor amendment to the state constitution. So I pulled the lever marked "yes," voting in favor of letting the town of Long Lake, in Hamilton County, trade twelve acres of town land, approved by the state legislature, for a specific acre of state-owned land they want to drill wells in. The one acre in question is a state-owned piece of the Adirondack State Park, which means they can't do this without amending the state constitution [1]. If this passes, there will presumably be text about this minor real estate trade in the New York constitution for years or decades.
[1] Our state constitution specifies that several million acres of the Adirondacks are "forever wild." It's a complicated mosaic of public and private lands, not a compact, contiguous [2] area.
[2] That phrasing is specified for congressional and state legislature districts. My father once drew his own map, from the description in the redistricting bill, rather than trusting the one the state legislature had published. Then he let them know they needed to rewrite the legislation, because they'd specified a figure eight.
I voted because, well, it would feel wrong to skip an election merely because there wasn't anything significant on the ballot. In Manhattan, we had a handful of uncontested judgeships (one "vote for up to four" with a total of four candidates, and one "vote for up to three" with a total of three candidates) and the statewide ballot question, an extremely minor amendment to the state constitution. So I pulled the lever marked "yes," voting in favor of letting the town of Long Lake, in Hamilton County, trade twelve acres of town land, approved by the state legislature, for a specific acre of state-owned land they want to drill wells in. The one acre in question is a state-owned piece of the Adirondack State Park, which means they can't do this without amending the state constitution [1]. If this passes, there will presumably be text about this minor real estate trade in the New York constitution for years or decades.
[1] Our state constitution specifies that several million acres of the Adirondacks are "forever wild." It's a complicated mosaic of public and private lands, not a compact, contiguous [2] area.
[2] That phrasing is specified for congressional and state legislature districts. My father once drew his own map, from the description in the redistricting bill, rather than trusting the one the state legislature had published. Then he let them know they needed to rewrite the legislation, because they'd specified a figure eight.
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