Susan Lerner
2:06:55
My name is Susan Merter.
2:06:57
I'm the executive director of Common Cause New York, and thank you for the opportunity to be heard on one of my favorite topics, which is election reform.
2:07:06
And although I don't know my companion here, I have to say that I think she has a point.
2:07:13
I think we are in the middle of the discussion of open primaries.
2:07:17
The National Conference of State Legislatures identifies five different types of open primaries.
2:07:23
The Bipartisan Policy Center identifies seven types of of non closed primaries, and we've really only been focusing on one.
2:07:35
In deciding to put ranked choice voting before the voters, earlier Charter Revision Commission spent a lot of time looking at different permutations of RCV.
2:07:45
They heard testimony from academics who had concerns about RCV, academics who had done research and supported RCV.
2:07:53
And as a consequence, what was placed before the voters was specifically crafted for New York City's peculiar requirements and the requirements of New York election law.
2:08:04
So that means that that Charter Revision Commission decided to restrict RCV to the primaries because of the peculiarities of fusion voting in our state.
2:08:17
Now the top two proposal hasn't addressed the question of how it impacts fusion voting and how our ballots are actually laid out in accordance with state law because New York state law requires our ballots to be laid out based on party.
2:08:37
So if we're going to a top two and you have a candidate who actually is endorsed by two different parties, are we going to design the New York City section of the ballot differently than the state section?
2:08:50
And that's a question that I frankly haven't looked at in detail, but I don't believe has been discussed, especially when we're talking, about a proposal which we do support, which is the consolidation to even years.
2:09:04
You are going to have city and state and federal ballot races on the same ballot, and ballot design becomes a concern.
2:09:13
We are concerned about unaffiliated voters, and we did a poll in 2023 of unaffiliated voters, and my written testimony details what we found.
2:09:22
And what we found is pretty interesting in that they really hadn't thought about open primaries.
2:09:29
They kind of liked the idea, but they didn't really understand the differentiations.
2:09:33
And they were most comfortable with what we call a semi open primary, which is the unaffiliated voter can walk in on primary day and choose which party primary to vote under.
2:09:45
And that really raises the question of what are we trying to achieve with primary reform?
2:09:50
Are we trying to achieve an increase in turnout?
2:09:53
Well, the staff report indicates that top two in California hasn't resulted necessarily in an increase in turnout.
2:10:00
I would suggest Colorado's experience, with a semi open primary is something we should be looking at.
2:10:08
But again, we're not seeing consistency.
2:10:10
Sometimes you get a bump up, sometimes you don't.
2:10:13
And I think we need to be clear in terms of what our reform is designed to accomplish, and then we should go about designing a specific reform for New York City to try and get us closer to that goal.
2:10:26
So I don't think it's time for us to be putting an open primary measure on the ballot.
