Leveling the playing field & enhancing democracy
Democracy is on the ballot in every election cycle, including this year’s June primaries. Two years ago, nearly 1 million voters embraced Ranked Choice Voting and voted for candidates in citywide or local races. In the most recent citywide primaries, we also saw record-breaking turnout with more than 1 in 4 registered New Yorkers casting a ballot, making it the highest voter turnout of any mayoral primary in the past several decades.
The Campaign Finance Board (CFB) made history as we dispersed more than $126.9 million in public payments to support the efforts of more than 300 candidates that met the thresholds necessary to receive matching funds. Despite these significant accomplishments, the board still has more to offer city residents and candidates alike. In addition to our matching funds program, our agency oversees the NYC Votes initiative that encourages voter participation and educates voters about candidates in every election cycle.
When coupled with RCV our one-of-akind program has helped various nontraditional candidates successfully run for office. Under these unique conditions in 2021, city voters elected a government that is truly representative of the people of our city. The City Council sworn in at the start of this year is also the most diverse in the city’s history and gave us our first-ever Council with a majority of women.
The Campaign Finance Board serves New Yorkers in many ways, but there are three main things that we are most known for. First, we are a good-government program that supports candidates seeking to participate in our democracy by running for elected office. Our agency is responsible for the disbursement of millions of dollars in public matching funds as well as performing comprehensive reviews and audits of documentation from the hundreds of campaigns that file with the CFB.
Second, we bolster a variety of educational initiatives that can be used to conduct voter outreach and keep the public informed on all things election related. This takes shape in the form of our NYC Votes campaign and the CFB’s partnerships and outreach initiatives which seeks to inform New Yorkers about upcoming elections by supporting local democracy coalitions in communities that are historically underrepresented in the city’s electorate.
Last but not least, the CFB exists as a regulatory agency in the heart of city government, designed to build trust in our campaign finance system. The CFB’s robust disclosure and oversight requirements promote transparency and accountability in local elections. Our “Follow the Money” database accomplishes this by tracking every dollar raised and spent by candidates and outside groups.
We are living in a time when many question the integrity of candidates running for office and it is clear that real campaign finance reform is needed. Pay-to-play schemes, big money in politics, and special interests have allowed corporations and a handful of wealthy individuals and donors to hold significant influence in our government. These tactics can allow a select few people to use their leverage for personal gain, further eroding public trust in our institutions.
It’s a disingenuous notion that publicly financed campaigns create more opportunities for corruption. Candidates in our matching funds program must also agree to participate in our rigorous audit process that was created to identify and eliminate any opportunities for corruption. Campaign audits are part of our mandate in the city Charter and are critical to our work. At the Campaign Finance Board, we pride ourselves on being an anti-corruption agency, and identifying and preventing any form of wrongdoing in our election process has always been our agency’s No. 1 priority.
Once corruption is identified it creates an opportunity for change and in 1988 when faced with corruption the City of New York seized the opportunity to pass the Campaign Finance Act, thus creating the Campaign Finance Board. Since then, the CFB has spent more than 35 years disbursing matching funds payments and providing public disclosures of campaign finance information to ensure that we have fair and transparent elections. In that time our agency has grown to administer one of the strongest, most effective campaign finance systems in the country.
We are proud to see our program serve as a model for other states and localities across the country that seek to enhance voter participation in our democracy. We are very excited that New York State launched its very own Public Campaign Finance Program last year, and we are looking forward to assisting and learning from their highly anticipated first year in the 2024 election cycle. Democracy is not a spectator sport, and we need everyone involved if we hope to reduce the role of big money and limit corruption in politics as we’ve been able to do here in NYC.