Chalkbeat

What the Jan. 6 hearings tell us about the moment we’re in

2022-06-18T16:00:00+00:00

A version of this post was originally distributed in Votebeat’s weekly newsletter. Sign up here.

This week’s congressional hearings were focused on the events of late 2020 and early 2021, but they are telling us a great deal about the moment we’re in now.

The congressional committee investigating the January 6 assault on the Capitol has expertly laid out the narrative showing how President Trump — ignoring repeated warnings from his innermost circle that his allegations were false — continued to insist the 2020 election was fraudulently rigged against him.

Perhaps we shouldn’t need it to be laid out in this way: We already knew his allegations weren’t true.

But — and I know I speak for more than just me — we really did need it to be laid out in this way.

A weird thing has happened even to me — a person literally paid to keep up with this stuff. The Big Lie is all so surreal, and the individuals making false assertions about 2020 seem so certain of themselves, that sometimes I fool myself into thinking there might really be a there, there. After all, isolated cases of voter fraud do happen. Is it gaslighting? The power of someone repeatedly asserting something false with total certainty? But the committee has somehow dispelled all that, laying out the timeline, the facts and the relationship between the players in such exactitude that it almost comes as a relief.

It’s not a sweeping, singular feeling of relief. I was talking to a person in the elections industry who was struck by the way the hearings proved that the people originating election lies, which so many worked so hard to debunk, knew they were false. Elections administrators, the media, and many others poured a hell of a lot of energy into mythbusting, explaining, fact-checking, and safeguarding the election and its integrity. Now we know beyond a shadow of a doubt that those who made that work so necessary and so exhausting knew the entire freaking time that they were full of it.

As validating as it is to know that former Attorney General Bill Barr was also “unimpressed” by the allegations in “2000 Mules,” even chuckling over how flawed they were, we’ve got a few far less funny things to reckon with. Such as, why didn’t the truth matter more? And how much does it matter now?

Trump, after all, somehow weaponized the lack of evidence available to support his claims, beyond shoddy and easily disproved statistics. It’s all one big conspiracy, ok? In this way, we find ourselves repeatedly having to prove a negative — rather than demanding that Trump provide fulsome evidence in support of such an earth-shattering-if-true narrative.

And somehow, even after a trillion fact checks and all this evidence, meticulously gathered and publicly shared, he isn’t the only one leaning on this playbook to rake in money and win support from the base.

A Washington Post analysis this week found Republican primary voters have nominated scores of candidates who falsely say the 2020 election was rigged. Some of them are running for positions that would give them authority over future elections.

In Pennsylvania, GOP voters chose state Sen. Doug Mastriano as their gubernatorial candidate. As a state senator, he introduced a resolution to dispute the 2020 election, and recently named Jenna Ellis, a former Trump campaign lawyer who worked to overturn the 2020 election, as a senior legal adviser to his campaign. In Nevada, Republicans threw their support behind secretary of state candidate Jim Marchant, whose campaign website proclaims that “his number one priority will be to overhaul the fraudulent election system in Nevada.” Marchant has said he believes Trump actually beat Biden in Nevada, which is (I realize I’m starting to sound like a broken record here) not true. “If rogue partisan activists who want to hijack the administration of elections in our country win positions of power, we all lose,” warned Nick Penniman, the CEO of Issue One Action, which promotes good government.

Meanwhile, in New Mexico, local Otero County officials have refused to certify the primary, forcing Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver to ask the state Supreme Court to order them to do so (the court sided with Oliver — and voters —on Wednesday). Why disenfranchise the rural county’s voters? Nothing specific, just “vague concerns” over voting machines. The commissioners declining to certify include the founder of Cowboys for Trump, who has been found guilty of a misdemeanor in connection with his presence at the U.S. Capitol Jan. 6.

In other words, there’s some evidence that disregard for the truth isn’t a dealbreaker and we can see where it leads. As Greg Jacobs, who was counsel to former Vice President Mike Pence, wrote in a statement to the Jan. 6, committee, “We are losing - I pray we have not lost - a common devotion to the first principles that have bound our people together for more than two centuries, and have made America a beacon of hope and freedom in the world.”

Trump’s doubling down, releasing a 12-page statement blasting the hearings and reiterating falsehoods about the election, complete with footnotes citing, among other things, the same “2000 Mules” film that Barr dismissed. Other politicians continue to fundraise and promote their candidacies via false allegations about elections, and the victories by Mastriano, Marchant and others show some voters are still willing to believe them.

The question leading up to November is: How many?

Back Then

In May 1973, a special U.S. Senate committee began two weeks of televised hearings into the Watergate scandal. President Nixon initially declined to allow his aides to testify, but as public pressure mounted and the committee’s investigation continued, he relented on that, though he fought the committee’s subpoena for tapes and documents in court. In 1974, with impeachment looming, Nixon resigned.

In Other Voting News

In late 2020, a lawyer for former President Donald Trump claimed he knew of a “heated fight” taking place among Supreme Court justices over whether to hear arguments on Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results, the New York Times reported, citing emails obtained by the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol. Separately, the Washington Post reported Eastman’s emails show he corresponded with Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, raising fresh questions about her role.
A federal judge agreed to an accelerated schedule for a lawsuit seeking new Virginia House of Delegate elections. The suit alleges the 2021 elections were invalid because they were held under old legislative district boundaries because of pandemic-induced delays to the U.S. Census.
The office of Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger has begun presenting its defense in the state’s first major voting rights trial in years.

The lawsuit was filed by Fair Fight, an organization founded by gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, and alleges some of the state’s voting requirements disproportionately affect Black voters.

A federal appeals court will hear arguments over the constitutionality of a new Florida elections law this September. Parts of the new law, which, among other things, restricts use of drop boxes, were earlier struck down by a federal judge, who said the provisions discriminated against Black voters. The appeals court put the judge’s ruling on hold, allowing the law to be used in this year’s elections, but the case is proceeding.
Some Democrats in California, Colorado, and Pennsylvania are promoting the primary bids of GOP candidates who are prompting false claims about the 2020 election, betting those candidates will be easier to beat in a general election, but the tactic is drawing criticism for attacking Republicans who supported the results of the election.

Good News Of The Week

By Christian McCann, Votebeat intern

The governor of New Hampshire signed a bill to address “overvoting,” a rare piece of election legislation with bipartisan support. Overvoting is the term used when a voter appears to have marked too many choices in a given race. Now, ballot counting machines must divert such ballots into a side compartment when that happens so they can be properly counted.

Jessica Huseman is Votebeat’s editorial director and is based in Dallas. Contact Jessica at jhuseman@votebeat.org.

The goals of the right and the left meet within ERIC

2022-03-21T17:20:47+00:00

A version of this post was originally distributed in Votebeat’s weekly newsletter. Sign up here.

We’re bringing our series about the Electronic Registration Information Center to a close. Recall that this all started because of a conspiracy theory in far-right media baselessly alleging that ERIC was a liberal voter-fraud plot. The truth, as we’ve shown, is that ERIC works to prevent fraud and does so better when more states participate. Another rebuttal to this conspiracy theory is that ERIC provides no advantage to Democrats, just as it provides no advantage to Republicans. ERIC simply benefits elections — for both parties. Given that the right is concerned about election security and the left is concerned about fairness in voting access, the attraction of ERIC is that it achieves both.

A recap of what the program is: a standardized voter-roll-matching service that gives all states the same type information in the exact same way, all aimed at removing ineligible voters from the rolls and ensuring that voters who should be on the rolls are registered at the correct address.

I’ll highlight something Justin Levitt, the White House’s senior voting rights policy adviser, said when I joined him on the Civics 101 podcast this week: “You’ll generally find that where you can have increased security without the tradeoff for access or other things that we like, that there is pretty uniform support for having that security,” he said.

ERIC is one of those things — a best practice that most election officials, regardless of political leanings, are enthusiastic about and supportive of, which is why it was so surprising when Louisiana suspended its participation.

Conservative secretaries of state have hailed ERIC as a way to keep voter rolls clean and free of bloat that can (and only very occasionally does) lead to fraud or mistakenly cast ballots. This can lead to a lot of nail-biting when it comes to local races with tight margins. ERIC also clears dead people from the rolls (though votes cast by dead people are incredibly rare), and prevents people from casting ballots in two states (this doesn’t happen very much either).

The left says it’s worried about disenfranchisement caused by aggressive and targeted voter roll maintenance. That’s not an unfounded concern — Texas, for example, attempted in 2019 to remove thousands of people who Attorney General Ken Paxton claimed were non-citizens from the roll, though most turned out to be legally registered. And a list maintenance process Ohio attempted to do in 2019 using its own data revealed a mess of improperly flagged voters — fortunately before any were removed. ERIC helps here, too.

“Removal of records from the list isn’t inherently bad or good,” said David Becker, the director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, who helped create ERIC when he worked at Pew. “Removing records of those who are no longer eligible to vote in the state or have moved is good. Removing records of people who are eligible is bad. ERIC helps make sure that only the appropriate registrations are removed.”

ERIC’s standardized roll-checking ensures that member states are largely doing this maintenance in the same way. Texas receives a report from ERIC based on the same standards that Washington state and Oregon do, making it harder for Texas officials, like Paxton or the growing number of Republicans advocating extreme positions, to call for aggressive list maintenance activity that could, truly, hurt voters as it has done in the past.

The kind of roll maintenance ERIC does also allows states and counties to appropriately allocate resources. If the voter roll is an accurate reflection of where voters should be registered given their address, a county can deploy its limited resources appropriately. Neighborhoods aren’t static, and not all polling locations will require the same amount of resources year over year. It is good for everyone that polling locations are appropriately staffed and equipped with enough ballots and machines to get the job done.

For all of these reasons, federal law requires that every state do list maintenance, and also requires that they do so in a “uniform and non-discriminatory” way. So if you are going to follow the law without removing people unnecessarily, ERIC is your best option. “States and counties are required to remove ineligible voters, but that’s good for the accuracy of the election and it’s good for voters,” said Shane Hamlin, ERIC’s executive director.

As we discussed last week, ERIC’s most commonly reported data point is folks who have moved and who have not updated the elections office with their new address. And who does that? I barely even do that. It’s not your first priority when you move. When I finally did send a letter to the New York City Board of Elections in 2019 to have my name removed, they apparently ignored it, because I get phone calls meant for registered New York voters three years later. No surprise: New York isn’t a member of ERIC.

Becker says that states without ERIC “put all of the burden on the voter to keep a state’s records up to date, and voters don’t do this because they don’t think about voting between elections.” But voters almost certainly will update their drivers license when they move, and ERIC has that data, allowing states to send mail to the new address reminding the voter to update their registration. This ability to proactively serve voters ensures that individuals don’t show up at the wrong polling location or have to resort to casting a provisional ballot — something all activists (and really everyone) should support.

Our four newsletters devoted to ERIC may seem like a lot for a single issue in election administration. But as I said when we started this journey, debates like this rely on a common understanding of the truth. And the truth, folks, is that ERIC is among the most significant advancements in fair, nondiscriminatory election administration in this country. We shouldn’t allow the debate to be swayed by bad-faith arguments made by conspiracy theorists and grifters.

Back Then

In 1879 Republicans in San Francisco designed and passed the “Act to regulate the registration of voters, and to secure the purity of elections in the city and county of San Francisco.” That language sounds surprisingly familiar, doesn’t it? It was primarily aimed at undercutting the up and coming Workingmen’s Party, and removed elections from the purview of the elected board of supervisors and instead assigned them to a board of commissioners made up of the city’s mayor and four county officials who were appointed. It also created a registrar of voters who was to be appointed by the governor, and had the ability to remove voters from the roll if they were suspected of fraudulent registration. It also required that voters register in their individual precinct by ending citywide and countywide registration. No precinct could include more than 300 voters. Anyone who moved out of their immediate neighborhood was required to re-register.

In Other Voting News

A stunning analysis of the Texas primary by the Associated Press shows that nearly 23,000 ballots were rejected across the state during the recent primary, largely as a result of the new ID requirements passed by the legislature last summer. This amounts to roughly 13 percent of all mailed ballots cast.
The U.S. House Oversight Committee has announced an investigation into a partisan review of the 2020 election in New Mexico. The Republican-led probe in Otero County called for canvassers to go door-to-door to check voter registrations, which the committee has said may amount to voter intimidation.
Kansas lawmakers are considering felony-level penalties for election workers who mishandle ballots, based almost entirely on one Republican’s concern that ballots went missing in a single county in Kansas back in 2010. Democrats say the move is unnecessary and that Kansas’s elections are secure.
Michigan lawmakers are also considering a slew of restrictive bills, but these are likely to be vetoed by the state’s governor.
Washington Secretary of State Steve Hobbs has requested an increase in funding in this year’s budget to accommodate updating election infrastructure and shoring up cybersecurity standards across the state.
Fox News has countersued Smartmatic, alleging that the voting machine company inflated its estimate of $2.7 billion in losses resulting from Fox News’s consistent misinformation campaign. Fox’s key evidence is a report by a University of Chicago business professor who indicates Smartmatic’s losses are merely in the millions, not billions.

Infographic of the Week

By Brianna Fisher, Votebeat fellow

This week I’ve taken a look at the precautions polling locations chose to use during the 2020 election to accommodate voters during the pandemic, compiled in MIT’s Survey of the Performance of American Elections. While poll workers in most places used masks, hand sanitizer, and markings on the floor to space out voters, only a minority of voters saw polling locations using, for example, barriers between voters.

Click to enlarge.

The Fraud Squad takes Pennsylvania

2021-09-20T14:58:54+00:00

A version of this post was originally distributed in Votebeat’s weekly newsletter. Sign up here.

The Pennsylvania Let’s-Not-Call-It-An-Audit hit a fever pitch this week, as Senate Republicans issued a subpoena for personal information on every voter in the state. They have made little about their intentions clear: They haven’t said where they’ll store the data or how they’ll keep it secure, and they haven’t even picked a company to do the work. So what have they made clear? They are looking for fraudulent registrations — an altogether different objective than the shenanigans going down in Arizona. Rather than a rerun, this is more like a sequel: Call it Crosscheck II: The Fraud Squad Takes Pennsylvania.

Does “Crosscheck” ring any bells? Awaken any nightmares? It was a chaotic matching program facilitated by the Kansas secretary of state’s office and championed in 2011 and beyond by the state’s then-secretary, Kris Kobach. Kobach said Crosscheck would take a look at the data in the voter roll and figure out who is in there twice and who might be dead and who is casting illegal votes from out of state — exactly what Pennsylvania’s Republicans senators are talking about doing now.

There were, of course, several problems with Kobach’s approach — as there will be in Pennsylvania. Primarily, Kobach didn’t fully understand how to use the databases. But also, the program was insecure and resulted in massive false positives. It stopped operating in 2017 because of, well, all of that. This failed program appears to, at least from what has been made public, be the Pennsylvania GOP’s blueprint.

Pennsylvania Sen. Cris Dush, chairman of the committee conducting the audit, said the investigation was necessary “because there have been questions regarding the validity of people who have ... voted, whether or not they exist,” he said. When asked to elaborate, he said there had been reports of voters who had cast ballots from addresses later found to be vacant lots. He did not give more detail. The Senate will hire a third-party group to process the data, though he said it would be “hard” not to hire someone associated with the Cyber Ninjas’ work in Arizona. The effort now has a website, which also provides little clarity. The only information offered about the “critical” data they’ve requested is that it will provide “a clearer picture of potential problems with the state’s voter registration system and any other voting irregularities.” That doesn’t mean anything!

So, does Dush say he’s re-creating Crosscheck, verbatim? No. But the only clear math between the data he has requested and the comments he’s made about its planned use equals a system very similar to what Crosscheck promised and failed to be: A top-notch tracker to sniff out all of those fake voters on the rolls. Crosscheck operated on a simple premise. It would take data offered by each secretary of state’s office and run the lists against each other, matching voters on first name, last name, and date of birth. And presto, bingo: They found thousands of people registered in more than one state. Except they didn’t, and Dush won’t be able to find people who have moved, died or improperly registered, either.

And here’s the craziest part: A program does exist that will tell you if a person may have changed their address or could be registered out of state. And Pennsylvania already uses it, and it references far more data than Dush and his colleagues could ever reasonably subpoena out of state agencies.

The program is the Electronic Registration Information Center, which uses data from the state’s election system and a second statewide database to verify voter information and produce lists of possible improperly registered voters to the state’s election office for further investigation. While the Pennsylvania GOP has requested partial Social Security numbers and birthdays, ERIC matches on everything from full Social Security numbers and email addresses. It then has data from dozens of other states to compare it to, providing additional avenues to ensure voter rolls are clean. It will flag voters registered in more than one county, voters who appear to have moved, have died, the list goes on, encompassing everything the GOP could possibly hope to find. In order to participate, states have to agree to share quite a lot of information, and the security protocols followed by the organization — which serves nearly 30 states — are transparently laid out and strictly followed. The program is owned and governed by the state officials who make up its membership.

So the extent of the problem is not simply that these Republicans are asking for information they should not have and do not know how to protect — or even what they’ll do with it when they have it. It is not even that they have made clear taxpayers will pay the full cost of whatever investigation they choose to conduct. It is that Pennsylvania taxpayers are already paying for a better version of anything Dush could cook up in the Republican conference room at the Pennsylvania statehouse, and they’ve been paying for it since 2016.

A hideous soundtrack Republicans apparently have on repeat this year is a remix of old ideas — like auditing the ballots, quality-testing machines, and cleaning voter rolls — that they’ve made worse as they remix them. We’re not about to hear Beyonce’s version of ERIC. We are about to hear Blink 182 rip off the chorus and shout it in a nasally screech.

It would behoove them to, I don’t know, check to see what security measures are in place before demanding sensitive data you don’t know how to protect. And you should certainly do it before you tell taxpayers they are going to foot the bill to buy a knockoff version of the handbag they already owned.

Back Then

The term “vote suppression” is a relatively new one. As Alexander Keysar notes in his book The Right to Vote, neither the Washington Post nor the New York Times used the phrases “vote suppression” or “voter suppression” at all during the 1980s. It began to pop up intermittently in the 1990s, though only 36 times total throughout the course of the decade. But between 2000 and 2008, the word was used 99 times in the two newspapers. The surge in popularity followed the 2000 election, when Republicans first began accusing Democrats of mass fraud at the national level, popularizing calls for laws Democrats said would suppress votes. “Manufacturing votes, bribing electors, intimidating local officials...this is the only way Gore can win,” GOP operative Mary Matalin said in November of 2000. That election led to the first and only time the federal government has meaningfully stepped in to shape the administration of elections, or to fund them. The Help America Vote Act of 2002 — prompted by the chaos after the hanging chad debacle in Florida and accusations of fraud — offered significant federal funding, created the Election Assistance Commission, and required states to have centralized voting rolls. This decade saw a heightened focus on voting and its mechanics, and the Bush administration’s DOJ took specific interest in sniffing out voter fraud. The term “voter suppression” would be used throughout this decade, becoming normalized in popular culture, to refer to much of this activity.

In Other Voting News

It’s been a long wait, but the two-pronged battle over Kris Kobach’s proposed requirement for documentary proof of citizenship for voter registrations is finally over. A federal appeals court had already found Kansas’s 2013 law to be unconstitutional way back in 2018, and the Supreme Court had already declined to intervene, blocking the state’s law. But a second federal court case questioned whether former Election Assistance Commission Executive Director Brian Newby — now the election director in North Dakota — violated federal law by agreeing to allow Kansas, along with Alabama and Georgia, to require such documentation. Newby, who’d previously been appointed by Kobach in Kansas as the Johnson County election director, greenlit the additional voter registration requirement in the three states, prompting a coalition of civil rights groups to sue in 2016. More than five years later, a federal judge has agreed: Newby violated federal law by not questioning whether the proposed new requirements were necessary for voter registration. The EAC will now have to consider the issue all over again, though it will have no practical impact on Kansas’s ability to resurrect the law. Alabama and Georgia passed similar laws, but have not enforced them, pending the outcome of Kansas’s litigation and the litigation against Newby.
Democrats have finalized a compromise version of the For the People Act, which has been months in the making as they attempted to get Sen. Joe Manchin on board with a rewrite. The new version, called the Freedom to Vote Act, changes almost none of the election administration problems we identified in March. And the bill remains unlikely to pass. Even if all 50 Senate Democrats support it, 10 Republicans would have to agree to the bill or Democrats would have to force meaningful filibuster reform. Neither option seems particularly fruitful.
A panel of judges has ruled, in a split decision, that North Carolina’s 2018 voter ID law is unconstitutional. The majority wrote that the law “was enacted in part for a discriminatory purpose, and would not have been enacted in its current form but for its tendency to discriminate against African American voters.” In 2018, North Carolina voters approved an amendment to the constitution requiring ID to be presented at the polls. The legislature passed a law shortly after, during the lame duck session, but Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper vetoed it. The legislature then overrode his veto, and the law was enacted.
The “forensic audit” in Wisconsin looks a lot like the one shaping up in Pennsylvania, in that we have no idea what it looks like. Republicans in the state Assembly have not said specifically what they are looking for, but they contracted with former state Supreme Court justice Michael Gableman to lead the investigation and expect to pay at least $675,000 in taxpayer money for it. Gableman, who once publicly said the 2020 election had been stolen from Trump, has not announced who he’s hired to do the work. An email this week to at least 25 county clerks, signed by Gableman, contained a PDF with some baffling demands and was flagged as junk mail in many cases. The PDF noted its author was a former Trump administration official.
An attorney for the Arizona Senate told a judge that the Cyber Ninjas’ report is expected on Sept. 24, but, maybe not. “Well, I should be precise about this,” Kory Langhofer said, after a chuckle, to the judge. “I believe the Senate is in possession of, or its agents are in possession of, a draft report but not from Cyber Ninjas. There were some ancillary reports, but the main one the Senate does not have yet.” In response to lawsuits, Cyber Ninjas and the Senate Republicans have turned over thousands of pages of documentation on the work, but not everything. Maricopa County is dealing with nonsense on multiple levels this week: A file of the county’s voter roll was posted online, which is a felony. The county is investigating the source of the posting.
Someone is knocking on doors in Florida to check voter information, but Pasco County Clerk Brian Corley says it’s no one from his office. Corley said other counties have received similar reports, including a report of a person falsely presenting themselves as a county employee. Voter information is publicly available in Florida, and it is not unusual for groups to canvas door to door. Voters in Florida should — as others should elsewhere — be aware of anyone presenting themselves in an official capacity, and ask to see county credentials before sharing personal information with anyone who comes to their door.
WMAZ has a great report out on the impact of Georgia’s new election law on local elections. The biggest changes, they say, will be for voters who cast their ballots by mail and now have to comply with a slew of new deadlines. There will also be fewer drop boxes, and the county will set up self-serve water stations at the polls.

Good Idea of the Week

The good idea of the week is from Virginia Beach, which invited the local broadcast media into the logic and accuracy testing of its voting machines ahead of the state’s elections, which are now under way. The piece explains the process accurately, and shows the process at work. The local elections administrator appears on camera, assuring voters this process has been in place for many years. This is a great example of how local media and county officials can work together to bring voters into the process, breaking down barriers that create stubborn misunderstandings.

Tensions still simmering around two co-locations set for vote

2015-01-27T20:18:08+00:00

Tensions over space are still running high in some city school buildings.

At a public hearing focused on a one-grade expansion of a Success Academy charter school in Bedford-Stuyvesant last week, Success parents openly clashed with the administrators and parents of the three schools it shares a building with. And the city’s plan to relocate three grades of Academic Leadership Charter School brought its own protests in Mott Haven.

The concerns and occasional hostility voiced at the hearings offer a reminder of the discord that can come from the city’s policy of co-locating schools, even as the de Blasio administration has committed to reducing those tensions. Both proposals will get a final vote at this week’s Panel for Educational Policy meeting.

At last week’s hearing at 70 Tompkins Avenue in Brooklyn, administrators from Foundations Academy, The School for the Urban Environment, and a District 75 school that share the building with the Success Academy testified that space was already tight and coordinating schedules was difficult, even though the building is officially at only 67 percent capacity. Success is looking to add a fifth grade to the elementary school.

Success Academy parents pushed back from the audience, many holding signs that read, “Support great schools” and “Don’t evict my child.”

“[The high school students] don’t come to school anyway!” one Success parent yelled at Foundations Academy Principal Neil Monheit as he testified about his ongoing discomfort at having his high-school students as old as 21 sharing bathrooms with elementary-school students.

Kourtney Boyd, principal at The School for the Urban Environment middle school, told the audience she opposed Success’ expansion not because she is opposed to co-location, calling it “the nature of the beast when you live in New York City.” Instead, she said, giving more space to Success would exacerbate the problems accessing “space that we already battle for on a daily basis.”

Boyd echoed the complaints of co-located district and charter schools across the city, noting that tight scheduling in the cafeteria means late lunches and limited use of the gym for after-school programming and sports for students. Jocelyn Nedd, principal of the District 75 school P.S. 368K, added that the building’s library had also been dismantled to add space.

Javeria Khan, principal of Success Academy Bed-Stuy 1, received loud cheers from the audience as she approached the stage to speak. She said it was crucial for existing fourth graders to be able to reach fifth grade in what she called “one of the top performing schools in the entire state of New York.” (The percentage of students who passed the state math and English tests in 2014 at Bed-Stuy 1, which had one tested grade that year, were among the highest in the city.)

During the public comments section of the meeting, parents did not hold back. One Success Academy father looked at the stage of principals as he said, “Sending my kid to a Success Academy prevents them from attending a Foundations Academy.”

A mother from Foundations Academy who spoke shortly after told the audience she felt “bullied” after listening to the comments made about her school, and that she was concerned that there would eventually be no room left for her own child. “What happens after fifth grade?” she asked, only for the parents to yell back, “Sixth grade! Sixth grade! Sixth grade!”

Under Chancellor Carmen Fariña, the city has made a number of moves to try to reduce space-sharing tensions. Officials said a deputy chancellor personally toured both buildings under consideration and had held additional meetings for parents and the school leadership team. A working group released its own set of recommendations last year, which included the creation of a system to monitor “high-risk co-locations” and providing schools with additional resources to solve scheduling disputes.

Speaking after the meeting, Success Academy Principal Khan said that the emotions in the room were indicative of the “parents’ passion” for the growth of the school. She pointed out that at about 430 students, her enrollment is almost four times the enrollment of each of the other schools in the building.

The building’s other schools “are losing students for the very reasons that our parents are here,” she said, adding that she felt “hopeful” that the Panel for Educational Policy vote would yield a positive result for Success Academy.

Meanwhile, another public hearing on the city’s proposal to move a charter school into P.S. 277’s building in the Bronx next fall drew heated reaction from parents in the Mott Haven elementary school.

The city has proposed moving up to 175 fifth through seventh graders at Academic Leadership Charter School to the school next year. They would join P.S. 277’s nearly 500 kindergarten through fifth graders.

Ted Hurwitz, co-founder of the Academic Leadership Charter School, asked the full auditorium “how wonderful” it would be to co-locate his school in the St. Ann’s Avenue building. His rhetorical question was greeted with a chorus of “No!”

There, as in Bedford-Stuyvesant, parents disputed the city’s estimated space utilization figure for the building and said they worried about the mix of older and younger students.

“We have conducted unprecedented outreach to families around these proposals, while also recognizing that – where possible – continuity is an important part of ensuring students thrive,” Department of Education spokesman Harry Hartfield said. “When schools collaborate, share resources, and work to meet the needs of every child in the building – no matter what school they may attend – our students ultimately benefit.”