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Groups Seek to Pressure Cuomo on Campaign Finance Reform


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Photo by 401(K) 2012, used under Creative Commons license.


ALBANY, N.Y. — It was during his State of the State address earlier this year that Gov. Andrew Cuomo decried New York's campaign finance system as beholden to corporate interests.
 
“For most offices, New York State's contribution 'limits' are substantially higher than those of any other state that imposes limits,” Cuomo said.  "Further, existing contribution limits for corporations are riddled with loopholes. In short, the state's campaign finance laws fail to prevent the dominance of wealthy contributors and special interests.”
 
Cuomo went on to prioritize putting tighter limits on campaign contributions and gradually phasing in a New York City-style campaign finance system with publicly-funded campaigns.

But since January 2011, the governor has accepted $1.4 million in corporate donations, drawing from a small group of donors for the maximum amount of money, according to his most recent campaign filing for the period ending in July.

Progressive advocates are desperately hoping that Cuomo follows through on campaign finance reform this year in a way that he didn’t on his promise to support independent redistricting and to veto legislators' gerrymandered district lines.
 
The groups pushing the issue include a who's who of good government groups, labor coalitions and other factions -- Common Cause, Citizen Action, The New Roosevelt Initiative, The Working Families Party and The Brennan Center -- under the banner of Fair Elections For New York.  

But the coalition is moving cautiously, cognizant that the issue will be difficult to move through the Legislature and because of lasting doubts about Cuomo’s commitment to “progressive” or "politically contentious" issues.

 “The fact that Andrew knows how to work the old culture well is a relief to voters. But that era is about past and now we must judge him not by his progressive statements but by his progressive accomplishments," says Bill Samuels, of the New Roosevelt Institute.  

Last week, Samuels' reform group called on Cuomo to give up his corporate donations in a statement, citing the U.S. Supreme Court decision in the Citizen United case that has opened the national elections to a flood of corporate donations.  “Such a step by the governor would be of national significance,” the group said.

Yet there has been no response from Cuomo so far.

Meanwhile, state lawmakers have stopped talking about campaign finance reform.  

Samuels says it doesn't look to him as if Cuomo even bothered to try to sell the Legislature on campaign finance reform.
 
“At some point it got pushed to the back burner and he never went out to sell it," Samuels says. "Having said that, the good news is there is a chance that it will be brought up for the 2013 session. He didn’t have to bring it up, in theory."

Cuomo's office didn't respond to an emailed request for comment.

During a July 10 Red Room news conference, Cuomo acknowledged the difficulty in pushing the issue in Albany.

"The challenge with campaign finance is it's not high enough on the priority list for the people," Cuomo said noting that legislators “aren’t hearing about it.”

The governor said he expected to have to get out and sell the issue to the public. “To get something done, for me, in this town, I need to leave this town, wage a whole education effort and get the issue up to the top of the list."

Cuomo told reporters that he imagined legislation could be ready after the elections — possibly even before legislators are scheduled to return to session in January.

But Cuomo has yet to launch a public education tour on campaign finance reform.
 
The state’s campaign finance system is notoriously lax: It allows individuals to give up to $60,800 to candidates running for statewide office. New York has the highest limits of any state that has limits. In California the limit is $26,000 to gubernatorial candidates per election year and in Ohio the limit is $11,543 for state wide candidate per year.

Most other states regulate how much individuals and corporations can give to a party but in New York a loophole allows basically unlimited donations to so-called "housekeeping accounts," which can then be useed to boost candidates.

New York State’s system is in stark contrast to that of New York City’s, where restrictions on donations are much tighter and candidates can qualify for public matching funds.

But before Cuomo pushes on campaign finance reform, he has to deal with his own credibility issues head-on, progressives say.

Earlier this year, it was revealed that Genting, a casino gaming group, gave $2 million to the Committee to Save New York — which has launched massive advertising and lobbying campaigns to support Cuomo’s agenda — during the time he was crafting and considering casino gambling legislation and proposed a gigantic gaming facility with Genting in Queens.

"I understand the general idea that there’s too much money in the political system," Cuomo said of the controversy with a Q&A with reporters at the National Puerto Rican Day Parade in Manhattan.

He then added: "I’ve worked with groups that represent the biggest companies in this state, the biggest labor unions in this state, distinguished citizens in this state, to create jobs, and that’s what it’s all about.”

Bill Mahoney, of the New York Public Interest Research Group, says that Cuomo is a master of taking advantage of the current system.

“He certainly has been exploiting the current system better than any other candidate,” he said. “He is getting the most money out of a small pool and he has exploited every possible loophole.”

Mahoney also notes that labor groups have been donating significantly less to Cuomo than they did to his predecessors.

That may be because of the governor’s support of new pension tiers and his hard bargaining at the contract table. Regardless, Mahoney says it has resulted in Cuomo squeezing even more money out of a smaller group of corporate donors.
 
Mahoney recently issued an analysis of Cuomo’s donors that shows one man and his companies gave Cuomo a total of $250,000 in the first 18 months of the election cycle. That man is Leonard Litwin, a New York City based luxury apartment developer who in 2006 ranked 374 on Forbes list of the top 400 richest people.

NYPIRG found that at least 102 donors gave Cuomo more than $40,000 a piece. Cuomo has $19.3 million on hand.

“The appearance in and of itself of a conflict of interest is very damaging to reform,” Samuels says.

Karen Scharff, of Citizen Action of New York, doesn’t agree with Samuels.

“In general, I think as long as the system is what it is you shouldn’t have to unilaterally disarm but you do owe the voters a strong determination to change  the system,” Scharff says.
 
Samuels says he hasn’t seen Cuomo expend any “political capital” on campaign finance reform with the same gusto as other issues, such as same-sex marriage.
 
Cuomo has the backing of the myriad groups aligned with Fair Elections New York, and of NY Lead — a group of very influential and wealthy New Yorkers including former Mayor Ed Koch, the son of George Soros, Barry Diller and Chris Hughes.

They are pushing Cuomo in the same way that Samuels is — by appealing to his ego and political instincts by telling the popular governor that acting on the issue especially in the light of all the national attention Citizens United is getting — will cast him as a reformer, not only in New York but nationally.
 
But Koch isn’t enthusiastic about the chances for reform on the state level.
“There isn’t as much interest as I hoped there would be,” he says. “It’s always hard to get the Legislature to support something that would give their opponents equal funding.”
 
As for Cuomo acting on the issue to get acclaim on a national stage, Koch says it sounds like a nice idea.

“That’s a very good thought, I hope it works but I’m not aware of any action,” he says. “To me the most important thing would be a constitutional amendment.”

Mahoney is equally as cautious as Koch. “For two years, the governor has said a lot of great things about campaign finance reform but he hasn’t done anything, but I don’t think he is the kind of politician who would say things just to score points. There hasn’t been a bill yet and that is the true indicator of how serious the effort will be," Mahoney says.
 
Mahoney warns that there is no half measure on campaign financing reform. “Public finance wouldn’t work without closing the loopholes,” he says Currently, corporations and individuals can donate unlimited amounts of money to party’s house keeping accounts.
 
Meanwhile, as advocates wait for Cuomo to take action, different plans are being touted in Albany designed to provide alternative funding for the public financing of elections so that the public wouldn’t reject the proposal out of hand because it uses taxpayer funds.

But Mahoney says it is too soon to talk about them. “I’ve heard proposals tossed around but without hearing the governor and other leaders’ positions it’s hard to gauge what is serious.”
 
Scharff says that the cost would likely be about “less than one percent of the state budget” and the gain would strongly justify the expense.

“Campaign finance is fundamentally necessary for us to get fair policy, to get a fair minimum wage to get a fair tax system, for us to own our elections,” she says.
 
She says she is unaware of the governor’s plans, but she thinks a special session, one that is rumored to be scheduled for December and will likely include a vote on raises for legislators, is a perfect opportunity to pressure legislators and to bring reform to a vote.

“They owe it to us pass something that gives us fair elections,” she says.
It seems unlikely that there be any pledges collected this year, that the issue of campaign finance will be used a political litmus test like during the election season of 2010 when Koch collected signatures of legislators who promised to support independent redistricting only to later oppose it.

The Republican Senate Campaign Committee issued a message to supporters blasting the push for public funding for elections, calling it a cash grab by the broke Senate Democrats.

Senate Democrats have presented campaign finance reform packages of their own and have been pushing Cuomo on the issue.

Democrat Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver was the only one of Albany’s three leaders to have attached his name to a piece of campaign finance legislation, but it didn’t get support from Cuomo or Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos, who has openly opposed public financing of elections.

Sen. Liz Krueger, a Democrat who has supported the various campaign finance reform packages over the years, says that despite her hopes it is not apparent to her that a deal on a major reform package is imminent.

“You really need two of the three players to really want to do it, and they have to either embarrass the third guy or give him something that he wants in trade for it,” she says.

She also says a slow build of public education will be needed to get voters to pressure their legislators.
 
As for the election season, Krueger says she doesn’t think a presidential election year will lend itself to a major push on a statewide issue.

“There are no statewide elections for us, so the big policy issues remain with feds,” she says.
 
But she says the story of the 2012 Presidential campaign will be the money that was spent by PACS thanks to the Citizens United decision and that that will give someone — perhaps even a certain ambitious governor — the chance to make hay of the issue.  

“He could be there to be the hero,” she says.

Espaillat asks whether Board of Elections is reliable: 'I feel not'


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Photo by azipaybarah


State Sen. Adriano Espaillat, after conceding for a second time to U.S. Rep. Charles Rangel in the race for the 13th Congressional District, said there were still questions to be asked about the election.

But the biggest one of all, so to speak, concerned the agency that runs the vote counting machine in the city.

"This is sort of the elephant in the room. Is the Board of Elections a reliable entity? I feel not,” Espaillat said to reporters yesterday as he announced he would gracefully bow out and let Rangel keep his seat.

He said he expected other groups to look into problems that occurred during the election. "You know, from the changing of election district numbers, to some change in poll sites to perhaps a lack of proper notification to voters and a bunch of other things," he added.

It had been a strange trip to get to this repeat concession by Espaillat. Nearly two weeks have passed since the chaotic election night that initially saw Rangel reported as the clear victor in the June 26 primary. Initial vote tallies put Rangel thousands of votes ahead of Espaillat, and the challenger conceded.

However, new votes were soon discovered and Rangel's lead shrank – at one point down to only 802 votes. Both candidates said the race was too close to call. Espaillat filed a lawsuit alleging widespread voter fraud. But over the weekend, after paper ballots were counted, the BOE announced Saturday that Rangel had won out with a margin of 990 votes.

Chaos is nothing new for elections in the city. The last major elections saw initial vote tallies vary wildly from later counts.

“People are getting used to this chaos, but not in a good way. It reduces the faith people have in the integrity of our elections, it temporarily skews the results," said state Assemblyman Brian Kavanagh, who has sponsored legislation that would streamline election night processes and could avert future debacles like the one seen during this most recent primary.

"We live in a culture where people expect real results right away, campaigns make decisions based on them," he continued. "It looks like Espaillat made a decision based on them and it was based on the wrong information.”

If Kavanagh had his way, his bill would have passed both houses of the Legislature and would have been in place for the September primaries. But it was frozen in the Senate, where it is sponsored by state Sen. Marty Golden. Kavanagh says he doubts the Legislature will return and pass the bill in time for it to affect the upcoming elections.

BOE employees currently tally election night data by hand – using scissors, paper, pencils and calculators to tabulate the votes -- even though the voters are taken on electronic machines.

Councilwoman Gale Brewer, who has been an adamant supported of Kavanagh's legislation, said at a recent BOE hearing that the answer is so simple that not implementing on it borders on the absurd. “To take a memory stick out of the scanner and take it to another computer and run the numbers …. It’s very hard for the public to understand we’re still not doing this.”  

Some policy observers believe that even without legislation, the Board of Election could move forward administratively and change the process of election night vote reporting.

“We think the attorney general's office and the state BOE should weigh in on the city's ability to change closing its closing procedures," said Alex Camarda, director of public policy and advocacy for Citizens Union, the sister organization of the Gazette's publisher.

It isn't just the Board of Election's counting methods that have come into question in the last few weeks.

The New York Daily News also reported that Rangel's representatives met with a representative of the board the weekend before the election.

The board claimed it was a routine meeting but Espaillat's camp denied getting the same personal service. Assemblyman Michael Benjamin, who supports Kavanagh's election-night closing bill, wrote in a New York Post op-ed on July 5th that he thinks the board is staffed by “B team talent” because of “political patronage.”

“From its top managers all the way down to the Election Day poll workers — the public face of the agency — everyone at the Board is a political appointee,” Benjamin wrote.

The assemblyman advocates putting the BOE in the hands of the mayor. In that situation, Benjamin would have the City Council approve the appointments of any chief clerk, executive director or deputy executive director.

Benjamin's proposal would require a major legislative overhaul -- something that will not happen before the November elections. But most lawmakers are not optimistic that anything will change soon enough.

“I expect we will be in a similar situation with some of the same stuff playing out during the September primaries,” Kavanagh said.

For primary election, South Asians in Queens get language help


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Salam Nabi, a halal street food vendor, has never voted in a city election because, as he puts, he has "no idea how it works."

The native Bengali speaker works in Jackson Heights, Queens, where the neighborhood is dotted with boutiques of shimmering saris, bustling convenience stores and outdoor grocery stores — many with employees speaking in South Asian languages.

He blames his lack of understanding of the democratic process, in part, on his limited English.

Nabi and other South Asian voters in Queens may have a bit of an easier time navigating the polls beginning with today’s primary.

That’s because translators and phone operators who speak Bengali, Punjabi and Hindi are expected to be made available in Queens for the first time under a federal mandate. Voting signs will also be translated into the three languages.

But there may still be an obstacle for many: No ballot will be made available in any Indo-Asian language just yet. While the city’s Board of Election has proposed creating Bengali-language ballots, the agency’s commissioners have not finalized a design. The BOE hopes to have them available for November's election. 

Nabi, 21, said the addition of Bengali as a language on the ballot would make a big difference for him. “I would vote now,” he said, as he looked outside the window of his steamy halal cart.

The choice of Bengali for the ballots, however, has not been without its critics.

Some South Asian activists wonder why the more widely spoken Hindi was not also chosen to be on the ballot or why more than one language could not be chosen -- reflecting some of the complications of creating voting materials in a city of millions of immigrants speaking dozens of different languages.

Federal Mandate for South Asian Languages

Last fall, the Department of Justice, acting under The Votering Rights Act of 1965, mandated that the city's Board of Elections provide written language assistance for an Indo-Asian language in Queens.

Bengali was chosen because census data indicated speakers of the language were more likely to have limited knowledge of English. The city’s Bengali, Punjabi and Hindi speakers are primarily located in Queens.

BOE spokeswoman Valerie Vazquez said the BOE's interim plan to provide Indo-Asian language assistance in Queens was adopted in mid-April.

She said the goal is to have signage translated and poll workers who can speak Bengali, Hindi and Punjabi in "only the identified areas in Queens covered by city planning such as Jackson Heights and Rosedale,” for today’s primary.

The plan includes recruiting two full-time Bengali translators; two Bengali and two Hindi phone operators; and Bengali Election Day interpreters. The plan also stated that the Board “will make a best effort” to recruit Hindi interpreters who also speak Punjabi for Election Day.

Thus far, 66 Bengali interpreters and 98 Hindi interpreters, many of whom also speak Punjabi, have been hired for Election Day, said BOE Deputy Director Dawn Sandow.

However, recruiting permanent staff who speak all three languages and meet federal requirements to work as phone clerks and translators has proven problematic.

"We interviewed two applicants and both were not comfortable with the level of written translation that we require,” Rachel Knipel, a member of the BOE's contracting office, said at a public meeting on June 19.

Counsel Steven Richman also wondered whether some applicants may be legal residents, not citizens – making them ineligible to vote.

A Debate Over Indo-Asian Languages

A number of Queens and South Asian community organizers and groups have praised the BOE for recognizing the large number of South Asians in Queens and their need for voting language assistance.

However, the BOE may run into a few challenges by choosing just one of three major Indo-Asian languages to be on the ballot.

During the initial meetings with the BOE regarding the new addition of Indo-Asian languages, community organizations seemed to have differing opinions on how they should choose which language to use on the written ballot.

Jerry Vattamala, a staff attorney with the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, said they had suggested Bengali since speakers of the language often don’t have strong English skills.

But Gurpal Singh, the executive director of SEVA NY, a South Asian organization operating in Richmond Hill, Queens, said the BOE's commissioners had been "very academic in their approach” by choosing Bengali, rather than taking into account the realities of the neighborhoods themselves.

“If you really want to serve South Asians in Queens, you should do both languages, Bengali and Hindi," he said. He said the “BOE is only doing the bare minimum to comply with the federal law” and that “even before the meetings, it seemed like the BOE already picked Bengali.”

Anil Kumar, a soft-spoken cashier in a Hindu puja store that is stocked with statues of deities, flowered garlands, prayer books and other religious trinkets, has been a citizen in the U.S. for 18 years.

He had heard of the plans to add Bengali to the Queens ballot. "We definitely need it," Kumar said. "It would be more easier to understand all of the citizens of New York.”

Kumar, 56, of Jamaica, Queens, is a native Gujurati speaker with limited English skills, and first voted in the city ten years ago. He recalled the experience as "difficult."

He said one of his main concerns of participating in elections with limited English is that his vote might be wasted because he might pick the wrong person.

“Sometimes it goes to waste, to whom we want to vote. Sometimes the vote does not go to them," he said. Kumar said that assistance for Gujurati speakers should also be made available at the polls.

“Although Hindi is the mother language, Gujurati people also need their own language," he said.

___

Kamelia Kilawan is a Jeannette K. Watson Fellow and a student at Baruch College studying journalism and religion and culture.



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