Paul Kirby reports in The Daily Freeman that Assemblyperson Chris Tague, a Republican from Schoharie, said he was worried about local funding at an Aug. 11 online hearing on mail-in voting this November. New York expects up to five million mail-in ballots in the November general election because of the coronavirus pandemic, according to the New York Post. “As usual, with this year’s mail-in voting, the governor has decided to pass the buck onto local governments with another unfunded mandate,” Tague, said of Gov. Andrew Cuomo. “This is a double whammy, and will strain the budgets of our local governments and also test their ability to accurately process their ballots with limited staff, potentially allowing for more mistakes to be made." Tague represents the 102nd Assembly District covering Greene and Schoharie counties and bits of Ulster and Columbia counties, and is running against Democrat Betsy Kraat this fall. “I understand we are approaching this election facing unprecedented circumstances, but we cannot allow the integrity of our elections to be sacrificed for the sake of expediency,” he said. State Senator Jen Metzger, a Democrat from Rosendale, was more concerned that all votes get counted, then the costs. “We need to make sure that every New Yorker can safely exercise this most fundamental democratic right in November, and the purpose of today's legislative hearing was to assess the experience with voting in the June primary, which included a 16-fold increase in absentee voting," Metzger said in a statement. “We want to make sure our counties and our state are as prepared as possible for the upcoming election amidst the uncertainty created by this pandemic." Read more about this story in The Daily Freeman.