The early school election results coming in Tuesday night have been good news for school districts in the Lower Hudson Valley, with school budgets passing by wide margins.
All 16 districts that have reported results so far saw their budgets approved by voters. Most incumbent school board candidates have been reelected so far.
Garrison, Edgemont, Pocantico Hills, Putnam Valley, North Salem and White Plains were the first districts to report results. The first result, from Garrison, came in before 8:00 p.m.
It's been a tense few weeks building up to elections, with districts and voters trying to figure out how an all-mail election would work. But at 5 p.m. Tuesday evening, election workers began the slow process of opening the envelopes and counting up the votes.
Here are the results so far for Westchester, Rockland and Putnam county districts. Check back for updates as more districts report tallies.
New York's school districts have been consumed with preparations for these elections for the last six weeks.
On May 1, Gov. Andrew Cuomo issued an executive order that said all school elections must be held by mail and rescheduled them for June 9. He later extended the final date for receiving ballots to June 16.
Districts could start opening and counting ballots at 5 p.m. today.
Several districts livestreamed the tallying of ballots, not exactly must-see TV.
Vote counts were expected to be very high, since voters did not have to go to the polls. Turnout for school elections has been very low across the state in recent years.
On Monday, with two mail deliveries left to go before the deadline, multiple local districts told The Journal News/lohud that they had ballots by the thousands, as many as five times the number of votes they had gotten the previous year.
Even as districts worked to make sure every qualified person got the opportunity to vote, there was an undercurrent of concern about what a potential spike in voter turnout would mean for budget proposals: Would people react to the economic uncertainty of the moment and strike the budgets down?
Absentee elections are considerably more expensive than in-person polling for schools to conduct, and the process was rife with logistical issues and voter confusion and concern.
Many districts were already struggling to put together their budgets for the 2020-21 school year. Schools don’t know yet if they will be opening their buildings in September, or what school will look like when they do.
Cuomo has threatened to cut state aid, one of the two main sources of revenue for most districts, by up to 20% if New York doesn’t receive enough federal assistance. Additional cuts could come during the year if state revenues lag. But nothing has been made official, so administrators took their best guess on state aid numbers.
In a normal year, a decrease in state aid might lead a school district to lean more heavily on its property tax levy. But every district is held to a locally calculated property tax cap, and to exceed it, must get 60% voter approval.
This year, no local districts took the risk. Every district in the Lower Hudson Valley kept their proposed property tax levy increase at or under their cap.
An issue that may face some districts in the days ahead will be the opportunity for second votes.
Cuomo’s original executive order did not set a date for a second vote, and the timeline led many schools to assume they would not get one this year. But on June 10, Cuomo issued another order that said schools could hold a second vote sometime after July 9.
Cuomo's staff has not yet set a date for second votes nor said if districts would be allowed to hold a second vote at in-person polling places or have to repeat the whole mail-in process over again.
If a district does not pass a budget, on a first or second try, it must adopt a contingency budget, which means freezing the tax levy at this year's level and usually requires big spending cuts.
Sophie Grosserode covers education. Click here for her latest stories. Follow her on Twitter @sdgrosserode. Check out our latest subscription offers here.
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Early school election results: See Westchester, Rockland and Putnam results so far - Lohud
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