Barron: 'Cuomo is disenfranchising a million Black and Latino voters'
Nayaba Arinde
“Gov. Andrew Cuomo has no regard for Black or Latino people,” charged Council Member Inez Barron, as she held a press conference on the steps of City Hall to highlight a City Council resolution demanding that the governor call for special elections to fill 11 legislative vacancies in the state Assembly and Senate, including her past Assembly seat, which she left when she ran and won the City Council seat of her husband, Charles Barron.
“As far as I am concerned, this is an issue of disenfranchising Black and Latino people, and it is being perpetrated by the governor, because he alone is the one who can call for a special election. If he doesn't call for anything prior to June, there will be no representation for a million people for a whole 12 months,” said Inez Barron.
The governor did not want to respond to Inez Barron's charge. Instead, a spokesperson referred the Amsterdam News back to a statement that the governor gave a couple of weeks ago on Susan Arbetter's radio show. when Arbetter asked, “Are you going to call special elections for the 11 open seats?” Cuomo responded, “We are looking at that now. You know, it seems like every week there is another open seat given the travails of our friends in the Legislature. If you have to do special elections, they are very expensive to do because you basically have to run a separate election operation. So it is obviously something you don't want to do lightly. I would like to know what the legal effects are, and I would like to know, on a practical level, how many more shoes are going to drop here and how many people are going to be leaving office.”
Inez Barron reiterated that Cuomo's flippant responses illustrate his blatant disregard for Blacks and Latinos.
http://amsterdamnews.com/news/2014/feb/21/barron-cuomo-disenfranchising-million-black-and-la/