Caroline Donnola
1:18:14
My name is Caroline Donola.
1:18:16
I live in Bay Ridge in Brooklyn.
1:18:19
I'm a freelance writer and editor, and I've been involved in supporting political reform efforts for more than forty years of my life.
1:18:30
And one of those issues I've been involved in is the issue of open primaries.
1:18:35
I'm a native New Yorker, but I lived in California in the February, early '2 thousands.
1:18:42
And in 2010, I actually volunteered on the campaign for California proposition 14, which was for top two primaries.
1:18:51
At the time, I had a full time job, busy job, but I believed in the cause.
1:18:57
And I went into one of the campaign offices every Sunday for many months, and I called other independent voters.
1:19:05
By the way, in California, an independent voter was called declined to state.
1:19:14
Now we didn't really decline to state anything.
1:19:17
We were independents.
1:19:18
We were stating what we were.
1:19:20
But in any event, that's an example of how independent voters often feel that they don't even count.
1:19:27
So we made the calls, and amazingly enough, that election was won.
1:19:34
We won by 53% of the vote.
1:19:38
Nobody thought it was gonna be possible.
1:19:41
There was a tremendous campaign and a lot of money to try to prevent it, but it passed.
1:19:47
Well, now here I am back in New York.
1:19:52
I moved back in 02/2011, which means although we succeeded in passing open primaries in California, I never got the benefit of it.
1:20:02
I moved to New York City where there was no such thing.
1:20:06
It doesn't feel reasonable to me because I think New York City should be in the lead of doing more to to improve our democracy, to broaden the number of people who participate.
1:20:23
To me, the the level of participation is the most important issue.
1:20:27
The more people that vote, the more voices there are in politics.
1:20:33
We all know, we've heard today, that voter turnout is not good, and we all do know that when everyone can vote, more people participate, and that includes everybody.
1:20:45
So in every community, there's a whole population of people who don't vote for all kinds of reasons.
1:20:51
We need to give those people a reason to vote as well.
1:20:56
Every year in my neighborhood, there are people petitioning to get candidates on the ballot, and they ask me to sign.
1:21:03
And I can't sign a petition because I'm not a registered Democrat.
1:21:07
I'm a registered Independent.
1:21:10
And when I say that to the petitioners, many of them are young people, and they are shocked to learn that we independents can't vote in every election.
1:21:22
So I think it's time for New York City to catch up.
1:21:25
I think we can't keep waiting for the perfect moment.
1:21:29
This is the moment to open up the process to everybody.