Recount of Assembly Primary for Tribeca Hands Win to New York University Law Professor
Contrary to the Broadsheet’s June 24 report that longtime Community Board 2 chair Jeannine Kiely had won the race to succeed Deborah Glick in the New York State Assembly by a razor-thin margin of 56 votes, a subsequent recount has determined that the Democratic primary was actually won by New York University Law School professor David Siffert by a margin of 15 votes. More than 17,000 ballots were cast.
Although the primary technically decided only the nominees of the political parties, the heavily “blue” political landscape of Lower Manhattan usually makes the nod of the Democratic party tantamount to winning the wider contest, and often relegates the actual election in November to the status of a fait accompli. In this context, the victory in the race for the 66th Assembly District (a seat held by Ms. Glick since 1991) appears likely to determine who will represent Tribeca in Albany for the upcoming legislative session.
Yesterday, Mr. Siffert, a civil right lawyer and expert in technology policy, told the Broadsheet, “I based my campaign on three issues: first, affordable housing; second, immigration and rising fascism; and third, the need to regulate big technology in general, but artificial intelligence in particular.”
On affordable housing, he said, “we are in an enormous crisis that will not be solved with any one silver bullet. But if we want people with limited means to be able to live in Lower Manhattan, the market is not going to accomplish that. The way to make Lower Manhattan affordable is to build housing that is intended to be affordable to those people, which means direct government involvement. Ways to accomplish this include expanding the housing access voucher program, and focusing on social housing, with a particular emphasis on supportive housing.”
Mr. Siffert added, “we also need a new version of Mitchell-Lama,” a State program that provided developers with tax abatements and low-interest financing, in exchange for caps on both tenant incomes and rent increases. “And we need more conversions like Westbeth,” a nonprofit housing complex in the West Village that provides affordable living and working space for artists and arts organizations, located in an 1890s industrial space formerly occupied by Bell Labs.
“I want to fight to prevent Lower Manhattan from becoming an exclusive enclave for rich,” he continued. “I want our neighborhoods to financially integrated.”
“I also think government has to be willing to fight harder with developers to get the public their money’s worth in exchange for the right to build,” he said. “In these deals, we sell ourselves short, and the revenue that comes in is trivial compared to value of the benefit that developers gets.”
About immigration, Mr. Siffert noted, “the legislature recently enacted strong laws that allow New Yorkers to sue government officials who violate their constitutional rights, and limit the cooperation of local law enforcement with federal immigration agents. These are a good start, but we need to strengthen New York’s status as a sanctuary state, and also increase funding for immigrant legal services. The State should guarantee the right to counsel in those cases.”
Turning to technology and artificial intelligence, he said, “regulating tech is a challenge, because what it is and how it works is changing so quickly. This makes it hard for legislation to remain relevant. So instead of focusing on a specific process, we need to prioritize what we want to achieve.” He cites as an example “surveillance pricing”—the use of algorithms to profile consumers in order to predict their willingness to pay, and then adjusting prices on that basis. “This is a huge civil rights issue,” he said, “with implications for race and gender.”
“More broadly,” Mr. Siffert continued, “the rollout of artificial intelligence raises issues about privacy, bias, the spread of misinformation, addictive behavior, and catastrophic risk, along with impacts on education, labor, and the environment.”
“But the process for making regulations is nearly as big a concern as the technology itself,” he added. As a comparison that is both encouraging and cautionary, he offered, “when the U.S. Supreme Court voided New York’s gun law, a team of legal experts quickly redrafted the statute to comply with the new standard created by the court. So when there is political will, we can accomplish a lot relatively fast. But the problem is that the tech industry is very powerful. They have lots of money and influence—much more than even the gun lobby.”
“In addition to these priorities,” he concluded, “I am hoping to bring fresh perspective to how we can make Albany work better.
Ms. Kiely said in a statement that throughout the weeks-long recount process, “our campaign, the opposing campaign, and the Board of Elections shared the same fundamental goal: to protect the integrity of the process, ensure that every ballot was counted accurately, and confirm that the final result reflected the will of the voters. We sought review of the remaining ballots because every voter who took the time to participate deserved to know that their ballot received careful consideration.”
She added, “I want to offer my sincere congratulations to David Siffert and their entire team on a hard-fought campaign. I look forward to working together on the many important issues facing our beloved 66th Assembly District.”