The end of summer is one of the secret pleasures of living in New York. Those with the motives or the means decamp for the hills or the Hamptons. The city for once assumes the languid pace of a metropolis at rest.
Sidewalks are empty. Subway seats are available. There is no shortage of restaurant reservations or parking spots.
A perfect time to hold an election.
Although candidates for local and citywide offices spent the waning days of summer frantically shaking hands at subway stops and the airwaves hummed with candidate commercials, all this activity at a time when New York is mostly empty of New Yorkers, a tattered palm card, floating in the breeze down an empty street, is one of the enduring images of the season.
Holding the Democratic primary—the election that is determinative of who represents the citizens of this city for all but a handful of seats—the second Tuesday after the first Monday in September is absurd. It is unfair to the candidates who must make their closing arguments to a distracted electorate, and, more importantly, it is unfair to the electorate who are denied a pressure-cooker of a campaign season. We are essentially encouraging voters to make uninformed decisions, based more on the color scheme on a campaign sign than on any kind of review of their platforms.
This election season alone has seen scandal and explication, charges and counter-charges, pledges made and promises broken. And the voters of this city have missed most of it.
No one pays attention to political campaigns until after Labor Day, the old adage goes. If this is true, then it leaves candidates for public office with a mere seven days of the public’s attention. Making this ridiculously short campaign season even shorter is the campaign blackout on Sept. 11, which will always fall in those few precious days between Labor Day and Primary Day.
And what did they miss? The comptroller race has seen a scandal erupt over whether or not a candidate was properly representing his biography, and has seen substantive debate over how to best manage the pension fund. The public advocate race has seen questions over campaign finance laws arise, and serious debate ensue over the future of the office. Council candidates have given their ideas on zoning, housing and quality-of-life issues.
But voters, for the most part, joined this conversation too late to catch up with what was being said, argued and debated.
This has consequences. Who wins on Primary Day is likely to stay in office for a decade or longer. But voters now either show up at the polling place, with only a vague idea of who to vote for, an idea based more on the quality of palm cards and who stood in front of what subway stop, or, more likely, not show up at the polling place at all, since, to the uninformed voter, these elections seem to be about so little. If anyone needed proof of the deep problem eating the heart out of our democracy, the historically low turnout should have been a wake-up call. 113,000 votes to come in first for public advocate? 134,000 to come in first for comptroller? 45,000 votes to become the new Manhattan district attorney? 1,800 votes to win a Council seat? There is something seriously wrong here, and the lack of proactive steps to fix the problem is more than just silly. It is offensive.
Even the vaunted Working Families Party’s get-out-the-vote operation, which scored big in the primary in both of the citywide races and got five new Council members, only managed a combined 22,000 votes between its seven priority Council races.
The solution lies in part in moving primary day. June might be an appropriate time for a primary, and there are many cities and states that do in fact hold their primary day then, but doing so in ultra-Democratic New York would mean that incumbents would have a long, six-month lame duck period that would cause too much mischief and ignored constituent requests. So instead, move the primary later, to October, or even November, and hold whatever general elections need to be held in December. The change might seem radical, but this year’s primaries make all too clear that our leaders must acknowledge the realities and stand up for informed voting. This might also be a good opportunity to take the extra step of putting the elections on the weekends and making them last for two days. New York should be ahead of the curve in voting reform, not so deeply behind it that the perennial stories of how bad our lever machines are become old hat.
This year, there were real issues at stake—the future of the city’s school system, how to lure good jobs back to New York, how to keep housing affordable—and several good candidates, some of them winners and some losers, tried to provide real answers. More people should have had the chance to hear them. More people should have been given the time to make informed decisions.
If laws need to be changed, change the laws. If obstructionists need to be trampled, trample the obstructionists. If resistant power mongers who bank their hold of politics on low turnout need to be shoved out of the way, shove them with force. The time has come.
Sidewalks are empty. Subway seats are available. There is no shortage of restaurant reservations or parking spots.
A perfect time to hold an election.
Although candidates for local and citywide offices spent the waning days of summer frantically shaking hands at subway stops and the airwaves hummed with candidate commercials, all this activity at a time when New York is mostly empty of New Yorkers, a tattered palm card, floating in the breeze down an empty street, is one of the enduring images of the season.Holding the Democratic primary—the election that is determinative of who represents the citizens of this city for all but a handful of seats—the second Tuesday after the first Monday in September is absurd. It is unfair to the candidates who must make their closing arguments to a distracted electorate, and, more importantly, it is unfair to the electorate who are denied a pressure-cooker of a campaign season. We are essentially encouraging voters to make uninformed decisions, based more on the color scheme on a campaign sign than on any kind of review of their platforms.
This election season alone has seen scandal and explication, charges and counter-charges, pledges made and promises broken. And the voters of this city have missed most of it.
No one pays attention to political campaigns until after Labor Day, the old adage goes. If this is true, then it leaves candidates for public office with a mere seven days of the public’s attention. Making this ridiculously short campaign season even shorter is the campaign blackout on Sept. 11, which will always fall in those few precious days between Labor Day and Primary Day.
And what did they miss? The comptroller race has seen a scandal erupt over whether or not a candidate was properly representing his biography, and has seen substantive debate over how to best manage the pension fund. The public advocate race has seen questions over campaign finance laws arise, and serious debate ensue over the future of the office. Council candidates have given their ideas on zoning, housing and quality-of-life issues.
But voters, for the most part, joined this conversation too late to catch up with what was being said, argued and debated.
This has consequences. Who wins on Primary Day is likely to stay in office for a decade or longer. But voters now either show up at the polling place, with only a vague idea of who to vote for, an idea based more on the quality of palm cards and who stood in front of what subway stop, or, more likely, not show up at the polling place at all, since, to the uninformed voter, these elections seem to be about so little. If anyone needed proof of the deep problem eating the heart out of our democracy, the historically low turnout should have been a wake-up call. 113,000 votes to come in first for public advocate? 134,000 to come in first for comptroller? 45,000 votes to become the new Manhattan district attorney? 1,800 votes to win a Council seat? There is something seriously wrong here, and the lack of proactive steps to fix the problem is more than just silly. It is offensive.
Even the vaunted Working Families Party’s get-out-the-vote operation, which scored big in the primary in both of the citywide races and got five new Council members, only managed a combined 22,000 votes between its seven priority Council races.
The solution lies in part in moving primary day. June might be an appropriate time for a primary, and there are many cities and states that do in fact hold their primary day then, but doing so in ultra-Democratic New York would mean that incumbents would have a long, six-month lame duck period that would cause too much mischief and ignored constituent requests. So instead, move the primary later, to October, or even November, and hold whatever general elections need to be held in December. The change might seem radical, but this year’s primaries make all too clear that our leaders must acknowledge the realities and stand up for informed voting. This might also be a good opportunity to take the extra step of putting the elections on the weekends and making them last for two days. New York should be ahead of the curve in voting reform, not so deeply behind it that the perennial stories of how bad our lever machines are become old hat.
This year, there were real issues at stake—the future of the city’s school system, how to lure good jobs back to New York, how to keep housing affordable—and several good candidates, some of them winners and some losers, tried to provide real answers. More people should have had the chance to hear them. More people should have been given the time to make informed decisions.
If laws need to be changed, change the laws. If obstructionists need to be trampled, trample the obstructionists. If resistant power mongers who bank their hold of politics on low turnout need to be shoved out of the way, shove them with force. The time has come.
