What am I voting on?

Six ballot initiatives up for a vote in New York on Tuesday, most related to issues outside New York City, left many voters in the five boroughs stumped.

Some found themselves confused by the wording of the proposals, while others didn’t know the ballot initiatives were on the back of the ballot sheet at all. Outside of Proposal One, a measure heavily backed by Governor Cuomo that would allow up to seven casinos to be built in New York State, the ballot proposals were not highly publicized in New York City.

Before the voters were measures:

  1. authorizing casino gambling in New York State
  2. giving disabled military veterans extra points on civil service exams
  3. extending a budgeting exemption that allows towns and counties to exclude sewage projects from municipal debt limits
  4. authorizing the state to settle a land dispute with a local government near Adirondack State Park
  5. authorizing the state to exchange Adirondack Park land for other ground with a company intending to mine on the parkland and,
  6. raising the age limit for state judges.

Some voters simply forgot to turn the ballot over to mark it up before feeding it into the scanner. At P.S. 84 in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, Jill Galarneau was surprised to learn that ballot initiatives appeared on the back of the ballot. “I didn’t even know I could” turn the ballot over, Galarneau said. “I didn’t know that was an option.”

At the Bushwick Public Library, voter Augustine Cruz filled out both sides of his ballot but complained that voting is more difficult than it should be because the circles are too small to fill in properly and the size of the text makes the ballot hard to read. “I feel sorry for older voters,” Cruz said.

The format of the ballot was not the only problem vexing voters. The way the proposals were phrased left some voters uncertain about what exactly it was they were voting on.

Casinos aside, no big-budget public relations campaigns were waged advocating for or against the majority of the ballot proposals. That meant many voters found themselves with little information about the back-page proposals, trying to decipher the legalese alone in the voting booth.

Maureen Rozanski, a voter at P.S. 84 in Williamsburg, said she filled out both sides of the ballot but she found the wording of some of the ballot proposals to be confusing. “Some of them were really complicated,” Raozanski said. “Proposal Three in particular, the sewage one, was really confusing.”

The fate of measures like Proposal Three, the county and municipal budgeting exemption for sewage projects, does not have much impact on New York City residents. But because of the sheer number of people in New York City, city voters’ understanding of the obscure back-page ballot proposals can greatly impact on how upstate New York is run.

UPDATE, Nov. 8, 2013:

WNYC estimates that one in four New York City voters failed to vote on any of the ballot measures.

Data Tools

@thenyworld

Our work has appeared in…

About TNYW

The New York World focuses on producing data-driven investigative projects.