Your guide to NYC's public proceedings.
TESTIMONY
Testimony by Janet Wootten, Member of the Public, advocating for open primaries to enfranchise independent voters
1:11:21
·
3 min
Janet Wootten, a retired public relations professional and a lifelong independent voter, testifies in support of open primaries.
She highlights the large number of unaffiliated voters in New York City, particularly those under 40, contrasting this with the older demographic of current primary voters.
Wootten shares an anecdote about having to turn away independent voters who wished to vote for Barack Obama in a primary, arguing that it's time to allow all citizens to participate in these often-decisive elections.
Janet Wootten
1:11:21
Good evening, and thank you for giving us a chance to to speak to you.
1:11:26
And, it's great to have heard, you know, 15 erudite people speak before I have to speak.
1:11:33
Anyway, I am Janet Wooten.
1:11:35
I live in Manhattan.
1:11:37
I am retired now.
1:11:39
I've had a career in public relations.
1:11:41
I worked for Howard Rubenstein and his son, Steven.
1:11:44
I have worked with
Richard Buery
1:11:45
We'll forgive you for that.
Janet Wootten
1:11:48
I worked with many educational and cultural and civic institutions for years and years and years.
1:11:54
So I'm an activist in the sense that I am a, you know, rebellious independent and have been since I was 18 when I registered as an independent.
1:12:05
Didn't even know what that meant, but it is who I am.
1:12:09
And, I'm here to tell you a couple of things that I've seen since I last sat before the Charter Revision Commission in 02/2003 when there was up for grabs, I think it was mayor Bloomberg at that point, I think it was, who put it on the docket for consideration.
1:12:28
And now twenty two years later, it seems like this time has come for something akin to letting everybody in the city vote, in the primary process since that, in our town, tends to be where the decisions get made.
1:12:45
I had a couple of statistics I'm bringing to you that, miss White, I heard you speaking to the issue of young voters.
1:12:55
And, miss Laramotte, I heard you speaking to the primary concern of housing housing and low voter turnout being the kind of focal points of of this moment.
1:13:08
And I think these stats speak to both of those issues.
1:13:12
There as I think one of our colleagues said earlier, there's now 1,100,000 unaffiliated nonparty connected voters in New York City.
1:13:23
But what's so stark is that close to 500,000 of them are younger than the age of 40.
1:13:33
I'm grabbing these stats from the CFB voter analysis report.
1:13:38
There was one of 22, and there was one in 24.
1:13:41
So these are good stats.
1:13:42
So half of the unaffiliated non far nonparty people in this city are young.
1:13:49
They're 40.
1:13:51
Okay.
1:13:51
It's people in my age bracket who are voting.
1:13:55
So the other stark statistic was that 50 close to 55, it's 54.6% of primary voters were over the age of 50.
1:14:08
And in the last election, the average age of voters in the primaries was 57.
1:14:15
So you've got this you've got this confluence of all these young people coming in to register to vote, and then you have a lockout in terms of when they get there.
1:14:26
I'm giving you an anecdote because I feel very actionably about this.
1:14:31
I stood at the polls as I often do that during the Obamas.
Richard Buery
1:14:36
And, like, I'm sorry.
1:14:36
You're out time.
1:14:37
Yeah.
1:14:37
You could just wrap up with
Janet Wootten
1:14:38
I'm wrapping now.
1:14:39
Okay.
1:14:39
And I had to turn voters away who'd come out to vote for president Obama and could not vote because they were registered independents.
1:14:49
That is not a good that's not a way that we should continue.
1:14:52
Thank you for the chance to speak up.
Richard Buery
1:14:54
Thank you so much.