So for today’s extraordinary special session, the governor plans to introduce no fewer than nine big, game-changing measures at once—everything from gay marriage to the much-needed public authorities reform, a new (scaled-down) tier of public pension benefits to a property-tax cap. And don’t forget the $3.2 billion budget gap that needs to be filled.

All in a day’s work.

(Update: the Associated Press just reported that the Gay Marriage bill will not likely be voted on today. )

Steiner and King join the Editorial Board at 3 p.m. today to discuss their vision for public education. You can watch the Editorial Spotlight interview LIVE online.

The ‘machine’ is alive and well! Do the right thing, Rob, or you will be a one-term wonder.

Hello, it’s politics. Anyone who thinks the Westchester County government will change is having a bad dream. It’s just politics.

Only three days in and the ride is already beginning. Don’t believe me? Wait and see. As bad as (County Executive Andrew) Spano was, it unfortunately is going to get a lot worse. Good luck fellow residents. We’ll need it.

Mr. Astorino, I truly had high hopes for you in your new position, but I feel you just made your first mistake. You might want to reconsider, just sayin.

Rob, Please don’t let us down. We voted for you and are supporters with great hopes for your future. Please do your homework before making decisions in the future on who you will sleep with.

You are all nuts! The county exec-elect picked the non-paid head of his transition team to look at staffing. How can you complain already? If the transition team puts forth unqualified candidates for position in Astorino’s administration, and Astorino goes along with the recommendations, then have it.

Surprise? Not for me. I could not wait to get in that booth and vote him out!

Thank you, voters, for waking up and doing what should have been done years ago.

Astorino will not be able to lower our taxes in any significant way, as the county portion of our tax bill is small. School districts are responsible for most of the taxes. I voted for Astorino anyway. ... What Astorino giveth, the local school districts taketh away.

As a new voter in the county, reading this newspaper’s coverage of Mr. Spano’s private security detail expenses was shocking enough to never vote for the man. Now, I expect to be reading in this same newspaper, by February, how Astorino has reduced budgets by 70 percent or more across the board. If not, I won’t be flipping his dilly switch in the booth come next election.

Great job everyone! Let’s keep it going, let’s vote ALL incumbents out and try some fresh faces. The madness has gone way out of control. Glad people finally stopped voting down party lines. Now let’s get the message out to the school boards, that’s where the real taxes are. No more using kids as an excuse to accept high taxes.

Here’s what I wrote in January 1998: 

When Andrew J. Spano arrived last week to take over the helm of Westchester County government, he found that he had inherited little from his predecessor’s once-elegant office except a few dusty cabinets and a couple of ill-tended potted plants. The sumptuous leather couch and handsome walnut desk and matching chair and refrigerator were gone. 

Thus, Mr. Spano, the first Democrat to be elected Westchester County Executive in 15 years, began his tenure sitting behind a squat rented desk in an anything-but-power chair.

But as his first order of business, Mr. Spano used the laptop computer he brought from home to change the law that allowed his predecessor, Andrew P. O’Rourke, to buy his office furniture at a discount and take it with him when he left.

Mr. O’Rourke paid $5,075 for 16 pieces of furniture and a fax machine, said Susan Tolchin, Mr. Spano’s director of communications. The county also gave Mr. O’Rourke his computer, which he had received from the county’s General Services Administration in a trade for a personal computer. 

Mr. Spano would like to see that county officials be allowed to take only ‘’mementos’’ of their service, not fax machines, personal computers or brass candlestick lamps. ‘’What’s at issue is what constitutes furniture and furnishings and what is a fair appraisal,’’ Ms. Tolchin said.

I guess that means that incoming County Executive Rob Astorino can expect to walk into a fully furnished office come January.

Now comes the post-mortem. We’ll spend today looking at voter turnout, district by district and talking to experts to figure out the why behind the numbers.

Visit our elections page as a jumping off point to find the races that are important to you and get basic information about who’s running, why and what they plan to bring to their community. There you will also find our candidate database where each candidate writes in their own words about the issues and their experience.

To see a replay of the endorsement interviews with The Journal News and LoHud.com’s Editorial Board, go to Editorial Spotlight, click “on demand” at the bottom of the video player and select a session from the list on the right.

The well-informed voter, the ones who know their neighbors and where all of the bodies are buried, will probably find less utility in our assessments than the voter who is more detached from it all. My colleagues on the Editorial Board don’t profess to know more about your community than you do. However, because we have been at this for some time, we do have some sense of who actually knows of what s/he speaks and who simply takes up ballot space. We simply recommend; mercifully, you decide.

In a good number of elections—we do this for school board, local, state and federal campaigns—our recommendations and voters’ choices align quite a bit; in a recent vote, our views and voters’ were in accord in roughly 85 percent of the races.  In another election, that figure dropped to just under 70 percent. Sometimes, as it turns out, we’ve picked too many Democrats; other times, it’s too many Republicans; still other times, we’ve gone with challengers when voters weren’t yet through with the incumbents. We check afterward because we’re curious, but we have no “dog” in these fights, as a famous politician from Chappaqua said once or 20 times. Our sole interest is in picking better candidates, not winners.

It used to be that the Editorial Board would spend weeks interviewing candidates behind closed doors, where we would be treated to a steady barrage of cliches about “giving back to the community” or “going line by line through the budget” or “thinking outside the box.” Days before the election, we would make our selections known, usually in short, unsatisfying bursts of “we think.” Then it would all be over.

That dynamic changed several elections back, when we started streaming candidate interviews live on the Internet and, using blogging technology, allowing voters to ask questions of their own. Doubtless the candidates  get more out of the new form, as they get to speak directly to voters; a few make plain that they could not care less what we actually think. We’re just happy that they’ve participated .

Frankly, if readers/viewers did nothing else, I’d rather that they watched at least snippets of the candidate interviews, which are available in short form here and in long form here. It is not scintillating “television,” by any stretch of the imagination; but it is democracy, and often the messy sort. We are grateful for it.