By Ashley Vasquez
In today's turbulent political and social landscape, our democracy is undergoing a rigorous examination. The effectiveness of our system's checks and balances is being called into question. While some view it as slow or overly bureaucratic, it's crucial to understand that the solution lies in the act of voting. Each vote, though seemingly insignificant on its own, joins with others to influence the course of laws and policies, shaping the trajectory for current and future generations.
So, what actions has New York State undertaken to encourage voter turnout?
NYC Votes is a program proposed by The New York City Campaign Finance Board (CFB), which has been working to enhance voter participation at the local level, particularly targeting communities with low voter turnout rates. Through extensive print advertising campaigns, they've spread the message "Get-Out-the-Vote" across various platforms. This includes online, TV, radio, and public spaces, reaching millions of New Yorkers in five languages for both the August primary and November general elections. To engage a younger demographic, digital ads are used on popular social media platforms. Additionally, they employed resources like print voter guides, the online platform nycvotes.org, emails, text messages, social media, community outreach, direct voter engagement, and a youth ambassador program.
Another noteworthy organization is VoteEarlyDay.org, which aims to raise awareness among all Americans about the significance of voting early. They provide resources such as state-specific voting rules, a vote early day voter tool to locate voting locations, times, election deadlines, and other helpful benefits.
The CFB also generates a comprehensive voter analysis report using detailed data collected during the election period. They use two distinct types of files obtained from The NYC Board of Elections to evaluate voter engagement. The first file, the active file, contains relevant voter profile information such as address, date of birth, date of voter registration, gender, and political districts. The second file tracks the voting history of individual voters. Both files utilize a unique serial number known as CountyEMSID to identify registered voters across the city.
Now let's take a closer look at the election data from the CFB's voter analysis report for the years 2022-2023. Specifically, this data concentrates on analyzing the participation rates and turnout among different age groups.