Image Courtesy of Colonie Indivisible
Fifteen days until Election Day, and only five until the beginning of early voting in New York. This past weekend, hundreds of us spread out across the Capital Region to educate, motivate and encourage our neighbors to not just cast a ballot, but to do so during the early voting period. Tens of thousands participated in No Kings: Vote Early all across the country in the single largest early vote activation in American history and, if you think that our collective efforts have not been impactful, you have to wonder why Meta disabled the No Kings main Instagram account during the height of Saturday’s activities. Apparently, we’re making MAGA Republicans and the oligarchs that love them, like Mark Zuckerberg, a little nervous. And perhaps their agita is justified, as the No Kings push for an early vote avalanche appears to be bearing fruit. The New York Times has a detailed empirical analysis of early vote totals so far, and it is showing dramatic increases over past elections in important battlegrounds like Georgia, North Carolina, Iowa and Maine. NBC News is also tracking the early vote and has similarly encouraging numbers all across the Country. So, this coming Saturday, it is time for New York to join the party; we’ve got early voting locations in nine Capital Region Counties on our website and, if you are an Albany County voter who wants to make casting their early ballot into a visibility event, you can join our friends in Bethlehem Indivisible for their People to the Polls Car Caravan.
Even before you cast your early vote, there is more work to be done. First, this coming Wednesday night, join No Kings online to hear how the movement is preparing for election enforcement, and to learn how you can start to plan now to be ready to protect the results of the election. Meanwhile, get out the vote canvassing opportunities abound in Albany, Schodack, Troy, Clifton Park, Schenectady, Colonie and Guilderland, and you can do get out the vote phone banking from the comfort of your home anytime between now and Election Day. And, if you want to help defeat some vulnerable local Republican incumbents, have we got opportunities for you! You can help canvass for State Senate candidate Sarah Rogerson in Schenectady this Friday afternoon or in Clifton Park this coming Saturday, or you can help Devin Lander flip SD-43 blue in Colonie this Saturday, or you can canvass for Assembly candidate Chloe Pierce in Bethlehem on multiple occasions. Lander and Pierce also have a joint special canvass launch this coming Friday night in Castleton, and you can also phone bank for Pierce on multiple nights between now and Election Day. It’s time to put in the work!
The Week in Flock
Troy Mayor Carmella Mantello has vetoed the City Council’s Local Law #3, inanely claiming that the ALPR regulatory scheme is “biased in favor of criminal defendants.” The City Council will override the veto this coming Thursday.
Mayor Mantello probably doesn’t realize that a federal judge has already determined that Flock constitutes “indiscriminate mass surveillance” that impairs our constitutionally protected “reasonable expectation of privacy in the whole of [our] physical movements.” If you want to see body camera footage of the Flock search that the judge ruled unconstitutional, you can see it here.
Flock has spent more than $2 million lobbying state and federal electeds since the beginning of last year.
Flock CEO Garrett Langley received a warm welcome (not) from protestors outside the TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 conference in San Francisco this past week. Once inside, the oh-so-punchable Langley cast Flock as “inevitable progress” and stressed that people needed to sacrifice their privacy for a “better society” made “safer” by Flock.
This week’s installment of cops behaving badly takes us to Savannah, Georgia, where an officer has been fired for providing her Flock log-in credentials to her ICE-agent husband, who proceeded to access Flock surveillance data nearly 1000 times over a seven-month span. Meanwhile, three other officers and a fourth Savannah Police Department staffer were fired and all face criminal charges after using Flock to track personal acquaintances.
Representative Rashida Tlaib has introduced the Get the Flock Out of Our Communities Act, federal legislation that would completely prohibit the use of automated mass surveillance technology. The NYCLU is merely calling for regulation of the surveillance state, by contrast.
Mapquest recently introduced an app to replace Google and Apple in case you don’t want to call it “Lake of America.” The app has a Surveillance Layer feature to show you where all the known ALPRs are, wherever you travel.
DeFlock Columbia County has been doing yeoman’s work down River. They recently FOILed the Columbia County Sheriff's Office Flock search logs, reviewing 14,440 searches since October 2024 and publishing graphics of their findings on social media. Here are a couple of their doozies.
Oh Albany…
The City of Albany’s budget crisis keeps getting worse, inspiring not one, not two, but three separate scathing editorials in the Times Union in recent weeks, amid word from Common Council Member Deirdre Brodie that the City may not make payroll in November and December. Mayor Dorcey Applyrs has already proposed a whopping 15% property tax increase for City residents and an increase of the City sales tax to try and close the budget hole, and now a contingent of the City’s Common Council has another idea; a commuter payroll tax which would be imposed on any non-City residents — State workers seemingly included — who travel to the City for work. The proposed resolution, which will be introduced before the Common Council tonight, requires approval of the State Legislature, so the Common Council is essentially asking State Legislators to impose a tax on, among thousands of others, both themselves and any of their own staffers who live outside the City limits (i.e., the overwhelming majority of them). For what it’s worth, Assembly Member John McDonald is already a hard no, and State Senator Patricia Fahy seems skeptical at best. The aforementioned Rogerson, who hopes to represent the commuter enclaves of Niskayuna, Schenectady and Saratoga County come January, is also a no, using GOP-speak to call the proposal “yet another Albany money grab.” We’re going to go out on a limb here and say that the commuter tax proposal ain’t happening.
Council Member Brodie — who is not a sponsor of the commuter-tax resolution — and Karl Urich of the estimable Albany Data Stories are doing a presentation on the Albany Budget proposal this Thursday evening at the Argus Hotel. Should be an interesting evening.
In case you missed it, the Dan McCoy-created Albany County Pine Hills Land Authority has accepted a proposal that could lead to the demolition of 17 perfectly good buildings on the former St. Rose campus in order to build a 55+ housing complex. The Historic Albany Foundation is not a fan.
Odds & Ends
Our friends with Ranked Choice Voting Albany continue to gather petition signatures even as they have already secured enough signatures to get their ranked-choice, unified election proposal on next year’s ballot in the City of Albany. Meanwhile, the League of Women voters has come out in favor of RCV Albany’s proposal.
Finally, we encourage everyone in Albany and beyond to join us tonight at the Albany Unitarian Universalist Church on Washington Avenue for the Kenwood Site Fight meeting, where you can learn about the data center proposed for the Kenwood Convent site in Albany’s South End and join the fight against it.