Local eligible residents who were looking forward to participating in the national Democratic Party won’t be able to participate, although some Western New Yorkers will still go to the polls in June.

The Democratic members of the State’s Board of Elections voted Monday to nix the primary. New York will still hold its congressional and state-level primaries on June 23.

According to Democratic Election Commissioner Norman P. Green, the only race that Chautauqua County will still have is the Busti Town Council Republican Primary.

In Erie County, residents there will still be able to vote on their next congressman for the 27th Congressional District. The seat was previously held by Chris Collins, a Republican, who stepped down and was later sent to prison for insider trading.

Candidates on the June 23 ballot include Chris Jacobs (Republican), Nate McMurray (Democratic), Duane Whitmer (Libertarian) and Mike Gamms (Green). The winner of the contest will need to run again in November, since the June 23 election is just to fill the remainder of Collins’ term.

Cattaraugus County has a number of local primaries in Olean, Salamanca, Ashford, Freedom and Little Valley. “We will have limited local primaries in 10 of our 52 election districts with approximately 3,981 eligible voters. We would have had 52 sites with about 16,000 eligible voters for the presidential primary,” said Kevin Burleson, Cattaraugus County Democratic Election Commissioner. “We, as of (Monday), will still plan to have early voting sites open and the 10 polling sites open on June 23 open as well as mailing absentee ballot applications with return postage paid to all eligible active and inactive primary voters per the executive order.”

State Commissioner Andrew Spano said he had pondered at length, reaching a decision just Monday morning. He said he worried about potentially forcing voters and poll workers to choose between their democratic duty and their health. While there will still be other offices on the ballot, Spano reasoned it made sense to give voters an opportunity to choose in contested races but not to “have anyone on the ballot just for the purposes of issues at a convention.”

New York Democratic Party chair Jay Jacobs has said that the cancellation of the state’s presidential primary would mean a lower expected turnout and a reduced need for polling places.

“It just makes so much sense given the extraordinary nature of the challenge,” Jacobs said last week.

State election officials and voting groups have called on New York officials to use federal funds to purchase cleaning supplies and protective gear, and boost staff ahead of 2020 elections.

Both the state’s Democratic Party and Gov. Andrew Cuomo have said they didn’t ask election commissioners to make the change, which is allowed thanks to a little-known provision in the recently passed state budget that allows the New York board of elections to remove names of any candidates who have suspended or terminated their campaign from the ballot.

The decision to cancel a Democratic primary is left up to Democratic state election commissioners.

Former Democratic presidential candidate and U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders announced earlier this month that he had suspended his campaign. In a Sunday letter, a lawyer for the Sanders campaign asked the commissioners not to cancel the primary.

“Senator Sanders has collaborated with state parties, the national party and the Biden campaign, to strengthen the Democrats by aligning the party’s progressive and moderate wings. His removal from the ballot would hamper those efforts, to the detriment of the party in the general election,” the lawyer, Malcolm Seymour, wrote in a letter obtained by The Wall Street Journal.

Board Co-Chairman Douglas Kellner said the primary cancellation was a “very difficult decision,” but noted state law allows for removing candidates from the ballot when they have suspended their campaigns, as Sanders has done and, further, endorsed presumptive nominee Joe Biden.

“That has effectively ended the real contest for the presidential nomination,” Kellner said. “And what the Sanders supporters want is essentially a beauty contest that, given the situation with the public health emergency that exists now, seems to be unnecessary and, indeed, frivolous.”

New York voters can now choose to vote with an absentee ballot in the June primaries under a Cuomo executive order that adds the risk of acquiring COVID-19 as a reason to vote absentee. Cuomo also recently announced the state is sending mail-in ballots to voters.

No announcement has been made yet on village elections, which was originally scheduled for March 18 or school elections which were scheduled for May 19, but were delayed by Cuomo last month until “after June 1.”