The following appeared on Monday, November 2, 2020 on The Island Now’s website:

Writing 48 hours before the polls open in New York, I am devoting this pre-election column to describing my anxiety about the ability of election boards to properly tally the results.

As a conservative commentator on 1010 WINS after the second presidential debate, I voiced my concerns about the possibility of an absentee ballot counting crisis in New York. I pointed out that I was confident the U.S. Post Office would deliver the mail-in-ballots but had little faith in the abilities of Board of Elections political appointees to handle properly the increased volume throughout the entire state.

I’m worried because county election boards are best known for being populated with political hacks. The fact is, when political bosses can’t find jobs for party faithful in village, town, city or county governments, they dump them in Board of Elections offices.

New York election law permits county leaders of the Democratic and Republican parties to appoint local election commissioners and scores of their minions. This means that in Nassau County, GOP boss Joe Cairo, and Democratic boss Jay Jacobs appoint loyal lieutenants to the top jobs that pay six-figure salaries and recommend people to lower level jobs.

For example, in the 1980s, then Democratic County leader John W. Matthews appointed himself election commissioner. He also received a government car. Why did the commissioner need a car paid for by taxpayers? Got me. It’s not as though there are emergency elections the chief must rush to.

In 2017, days after Hempstead’s Republican Town Supervisor Anthony Santino lost re-election to Democrat Laura Gillen he was rewarded for failure. He was named to an administrative assistant job at the Board of Elections that paid $160,000 annually.

When Newsday asked Lawrence Levy, executive dean of the National Center for Suburban Studies at Hofstra University, about the Santino appointment, he replied, “It’s business as usual.”

Political cronyism at the county Board of Elections is pandemic, especially in New York City.

In 1940, a government investigation concluded the city boards were afflicted with “illegality, inefficiency, laxity and waste.”

And since then little has changed.

A 2013 report issued by New York City’s Department of Investigation noted that in the five borough offices, 10 percent of employees were related to one another and found “illegalities, misconduct, and antiquated operations.”

As for the current cronyism problem, The New York Times recently reported a long list of relatives of public officials who have patronage jobs at the Board of Elections.

“It’s like being in line at a concert,” said one former employee who received her job through a City Council member. “People just get swept in.”

The Times article noted that the Board of Elections “is chronically dysfunctional” and “has a culture where ineptitude is common and accountability is rare.”

It is not unusual for staffers to show up late, punch in and go shopping or to watch Netflix on their computers, The Times said.

Pervasive incompetence may help explain the disgraceful Election Board antics in recent years which included the improper purging of 200,000 voters from the New York City registration rolls.

As for this year, The Times has reported that the city Board of Elections “failed to mail out many absentee ballots until the day before the [June] primary, disenfranchising voters, and sent erroneous general election ballot packages to many other residents, spreading confusion….”

Counting absentee ballots after the low turnout primary took over a month in Manhattan’s 12th Congressional District represented by U.S. Rep. Carolyn Maloney.  One can only imagine how long it will take in a general election with voter turnout that could break 70 percent.

While Biden will likely carry New York by a very wide margin, delays in vote tabulations may not matter as much as it will in the tightly contested states of Florida, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Michigan. Nevertheless, that does not excuse the astounding incompetence of Boards of Elections employees throughout the Empire State.

But whatever happens on Election Day, don’t expect pols to rush back to Albany to implement reforms.

They will continue to tolerate the “semi-functioning anachronism” because protecting the patronage jobs of their family members, friends and political sidekicks is the first priority of the political class.

In other words, expect “business as usual.”

The following appeared on Monday, October 19, 2020 on The Island Now’s website:

Since the Democratic Convention adjourned in July, The New York Times and its media allies have been depicting Joe Biden as a “pragmatic moderate.”

True, there was a time when Sen. Joe Biden was something of a centrist.

In 1973, he criticized Roe v. Wade for going too far. He was an avid supporter of the Hyde Amendment, which prohibited the use of federal funds to pay for abortions.

During the Reagan years, he supported the Kemp-Roth tax cuts, voted for the president’s budget and tax reduction bill, and supported Reagan’s call for the line-item budget veto.

Biden boasted that the National Taxpayers Association rated him the “sixth most fiscally conservative senator.”

During the 1990s, Biden voted for the Clinton-Gingrich Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act, which President Clinton declared “ended welfare as we know it.”

Biden was an enthusiastic proponent of the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act.

The Senate version of the bill, which approved funding to hire 100,000 new cops and $6.1 billion to build prisons, was drafted by Biden with the input of the National Association of Police Organizations and was known as the Biden Crime Bill.

However, this year Biden—succumbing to the pressure from the radical wing of his party—repudiated his support of the Hyde Amendment and the 1990s Welfare Reform and Crime laws. Drug addicts, he now holds, have a disease, hence “no one should be in prison because they use drugs.”

And contrary to his denial in the first presidential debate, Biden embraced a radical leftist platform that has been memorialized in the Biden-Sanders “Unity Manifesto.”

In that 110-page document, Biden agreed to support Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s $93 trillion Green New Deal, which calls for the elimination of the use of all fossil fuels by 2035 and the immediate end of fracking.

Biden bought into Sander’s “Medicare for all” via an installment plan that would eventually drive private insurance companies out of business—and leave hundreds of thousands unemployed—because, as a Wall Street Journal editorial noted, “it would further inflate the cost of private plans by making them to pay more to compensate for the government’s underpayments to hospitals and doctors.”

The manifesto endorses free college tuition, free breakfasts, lunches and dinners for public school students, forgiveness of student loans, wealth redistribution, higher taxes, federal takeover of local zoning laws, defunding of the police departments, and the replacement of law enforcement officers with social workers.

It calls for the elimination of shareholder capitalism, charter schools and cash bail.

After releasing the manifesto, Sen. Bernie Sanders boasted, “I think if those task force proposals are implemented … Joe Biden will become the most progressive president since Franklin D. Roosevelt.”

The Wall Street Journal agreed. An editorial called the Biden-Sanders manifesto, “the most radical policy document of either major party in our lifetime. It leaps to the left of the Obama administration on nearly every policy area, from education to taxes to climate change.”

Then there is the issue of the Supreme Court. Many Democratic members of Congress have called for adding more justices to the court to ensure it is dominated by leftists.

With public opinion surveys indicating that over 70 percent of Americans oppose packing the court, one would think Biden would state his position on the issue.

But that has not been the case.

When asked to tell the American people his take on the issue, he said, “They’ll know my position on court packing when the election is over.”

On another occasion, after a reporter asked Biden, “Well, sir don’t the voters deserve to know where you stand…”, Biden cut him off and said, “No they don’t.”

Since then Biden has backed off, saying he would give an answer before Election Day depending on how the Judge Barrett vote goes in the Senate.

Nevertheless, the Latin legal maxim is Qui tacet consentire —“Silence gives consent.” Hence, I can only assume Biden’s silence on the issue means he supports packing the court.

Joe Biden is not a “pragmatic moderate.” He has surrendered to the far left to obtain a lease on the White House. If elected, his administration will be dominated by big government bureaucrats intent on controlling every aspect of our lives.

Elections, like policies, have consequences. Voters should be prepared for the consequences of policies Biden will impose if they elect him president.