News Clips

“What we see in the current system is that politicians are advised to dig down into their base of existing supporters and don’t worry about voters in other communities who didn’t vote for you last time,” said Susan Lerner, executive director of Common Cause New York, a good-government group. “With ranked-choice voting, candidates are unlikely to be successful if they only speak to their base, because that slice of voters won’t be enough.”

State lawmakers enacted early voting in their last legislative session, delivering a victory to open-government advocates such as Common Cause Executive Director Susan Lerner, who have long pushed for the change... The new system will help election officials work out bugs and help people with rigid schedules, Ms. Lerner said. “It takes the stress off Election Day,” she added.

Plaintiffs in the case include the New York Immigration Coalition, Common Cause/New York, Community Voices Heard and Citizen Action of New York. On Friday, the advocates were represented in court by attorney Cameron Kistler and Farbod Faraji.

“It’s a way to help voters make sense of crowded candidate fields which, luckily, we have a lot of here in New York City because of our excellent campaign-finance system,” Lerner said. “We believe that Ranked-Choice Voting, which allows you to rank up to your five preferred candidates, but to vote for only one if that’s what you prefer to do, is really well suited for our election context here in New York City.”

There are 5 consequential questions on the New York City ballot this fall, each of which poses changes to city elections or governance for "yes" or "no" responses from voters. Two leading government reform experts -- Susan Lerner of Common Cause NY and Rachel Bloom of Citizens Union -- joined the podcast to discuss each of the five ballot questions and whether voters should approve or disapprove them.

Voters will have multiple days to cast their ballots instead of just one, but Susan Lerner, of Common Cause of New York, doesn't necessarily expect higher turnout. She says that implementing the change this year is more about “the ability for people to vote at their own chosen time.” With the presidential election next year, Lerner thinks this is a good time to work out the kinks and make sure everything will be smooth sailing in 2020. “Really need to get early voting right this year so that we can improve it and have it really ready to go in 2020 when, in all honesty, the turnout will be larger,” she said