New York State and Dutchess County Election Recap

Republicans Maintain Majority in Dutchess County Legislature

The results from the recent election on November 2 are now finalized after voters in Dutchess County decided on a number of significant ballot propositions and local races.

Democrat Robin Lois was reelected as Dutchess county comptroller, beating Republican candidate Ola Nesheiwat Hawatmeh by two points, but Dutchess still remains a red county. 

All incumbent Republicans were reelected in the legislature and as town supervisors. Tony D’Aquanni (R) beat incumbent District 6 legislator Rebecca Edwards (D) by five points, while Brendan Lawler (D) lost his reelection for District 4 legislator to Benjamin N. Geller (R). In Hyde Park, Alfred D. Torreggiani (R) defeated town supervisor Aileen Rohr (D) and Brian Walsh (R) won against incumbent Darrah Cloud (D) for Pine Plains town supervisor. 

Gregg Pulver (R) worries that with more seats gained for Republicans, this will exacerbate distrust between the two parties in the Legislature, which he says has been mounting for some time now. "I am not blaming either side, we both have culpability in this," he said following the election, noting that he hopes more dialogue will be encouraged in the future. 

Although there were no statewide or federal elections, on the back of their local election ballots, New Yorkers were presented with the opportunity to weigh in on five proposals that could change the state constitution and affect future policies. These proposals pertained to amending the redistricting process, establishing the right to clean air, clean water and a healthful environment, eliminating 10-day advance voter registration requirement, authorizing no-excuse absentee ballot voting and increasing the authority of the New York City Civil Court.

New Yorkers rejected the majority of the proposals, only voting to approve proposals 2 and 5. While some of the measures were shot down by a significant margin, there was also a large number of voters who left the questions blank, indicating that many either were uneducated on the proposals and couldn’t decide or simply forgot to flip over their ballot. As voters failed to approve measures aimed at expanding voting rights and reforming redistricting — causes heavily backed by Democrats — state Republicans were quick to claim victory following the election.

“Last night to me just confirms that we need to stay on message, that we're on the right side of the issues and we're going to keep pushing,” Senate Minority Leader Robert Ortt said.

The first proposal would have addressed a few issues involving redistricting. In 2014, New Yorkers voted on giving control to an independent committee, consisting of four Democrats, four Republicans and two independents to control the redistricting process. This proposal would have changed a few ways the committee would have operated, including having all people, regardless of citizenship, accounted for in redistricting, changing voting requirements for the committee to approve district maps and making the committee come to decisions by majority vote. This proposal would have also fixed the number of state senators to 63 and enforce that incarcerated people should be counted at their addresses, not the prison they are in. 

The second proposal, which passed, will amend the Bill of Rights of the New York State Constitution to add that New York is entitled to environmental rights like clean air, clean water, and a healthful environment. This is in hopes that future policy about the environment will have a stronger foundation with this being written as a right in the state constitution. 

The third and fourth proposals deal with the issue of voting rights. The former wished to remove Article 2, Section 5 of the state constitution stating a citizen must be registered to vote 10 days before an election. The latter hoped to change the laws around absentee ballots by allowing more people access to them, not just those who are sick, disabled or unavailable to reach a polling center due to conflicts. 

The fifth proposal, and the second successfully voted through, has increased the claim amount in civil courts from $25,000 to $50,000. This means that more cases will be heard in civil courts rather than going to the State Supreme Court, which will help alleviate case backlog.

Photo by Matthew Donohue '23