“It’s ridiculous. There’s no reason it should be like this,” said Tyler Kalahar, Program Coordinator for the Center of Community Action and Research (CCAR) at the Pace University Pleasantville Campus, regarding the amount of time in between the voter registration deadline and Election Day.
The voter registration deadline for New York State was Oct. 12. Election Day is not until Nov. 6.
Kalahar said he believes interest in politics has risen since the 2016 election and voter registration initiatives by CCAR have been successful. But he said he felt election reform was needed. He’s not the only one.
A running count of voters registered by CCAR. The voter registration deadline for New York State was Friday, Oct. 12. (Pleasantville Press/Kamari Stewart)
“We need a tremendous amount of election reform in New York,” said Peter Harckham, a Democrat who is challenging Republican State Senator Terrence Murphy in next month’s election (Murphy’s campaign did not return calls by press time). Same-day registration, early voting, voting by mail, and automatic voter registration are just a few of the changes Harckham said he wants.
These initiatives have been placed on ballots before but have been rejected. (The Brennan Center for Justice has kept close tabs on the matter.)
Although Kalahar and Harckham agree that voter registration initiatives have been successful this year, the next step is actually getting people to the polls.
“[Young people] think they need to know everything about politics when they go into the booth,” Kalahar said. “You do not need to know everything about politics.”
He said he believes that it is the job of the politicians to know everything about politics. Voters, he said, should only be concerned with the two to three issues they care most about so that they can easily identify a candidate who aligns with those values.
Harckham said that one way to increase issue education is to reduce the influence of corporations in politics. “It’s a dialogue between two people speaking, not a corporation versus a person.”
On Election Day, CCAR will be running a voter van that will transport students to and from the polls.
“The old adage [goes] ‘If you don’t vote, you can’t complain.’ But the new adage is ‘Vote like your life depends on it,’ because it does,” said Harckham.