DFNYC Endorsement Rules & Procedure - 2013 City Races

We are holding an endorsement vote in the NYC Comptrollers' Race.

Voting is open now!  Voting will close Monday, Aug. 19th, at midnight.

Click here for the ballot - it only takes a minute to vote.

Endorsement Rules for Comptroller Race:

(Scroll down for our general rules and procedure in our 2013 city endorsements from April.)

Eligible voters: You are eligible to vote if you have attended at least 2 DFNYC events since November 15th, 2011 (our fundraiser with Howard Dean). If you are not sure, please vote; we will determine eligibility before counting ballots.

Ballot: Click here for the ballot.  The options on the ballot are Eliot Spitzer, Scott Stringer, No Endorsement, and Abstain. Votes for No Endorsement will count towards the total; whereas votes for Abstain will not count towards the total number of votes.

Threshold for Endorsement:  After consultation with our members, we've decided that to win DFNYC's endorsement in the Comptroller race, a candidate must get (1) a majority of the votes, and (2) at least 5% more than his opponent.

Anonymous Voting: Democracy for NYC is committed to the principle of anonymous voting. No DFNYC leader will see who you vote for. To learn about our process for this, scroll down.

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April Endorsements:

Democracy for NYC held endorsement votes for mayor and other city races for the 2013 elections, and announced the results on Thursday, April 18th.  (Democratic primary Sept. 10th; General election Nov. 5th.)

Voting Period:

Voting opened Tuesday, April 9th and closed on Tuesday, April 16th at 5:00 P.M.

Candidates' Answers to our DFNYC 2013 Questionnaire - click here.

Are you a candidate? Submit answers here.

Eligibility to Vote:

All DFNYC members that have attended at least 2 events since November 15th, 2011 (our fundraiser with Howard Dean) were be eligible to vote. At least one of the two eligible events must have taken place on or before March 6th of this year.

Anonymous Voting:

A Big Thank You to our vote counters, Jeff Gardner and Franco Caliz!

Democracy for NYC is committed to anonymous voting.  We also want to do things efficiently. So after feedback from members last summer, we decided to do on-line voting, and have the votes counted by DFA group leaders in other states.   

After we finalized the ballot on Survey Monkey, we gave the account login to our vote counters, and they changed the password. After the voting deadline, they sent us only the identifying info of each voter (not who you voted for) and then we told them, based on our records, who was eligible to vote. Only votes of eligible voters were counted.  The ballots will be cleared out of the system before DFNYC Leadership has access to the account again. No DFNYC Leaders have access to the ballots; we do not know who you voted for.

Votes Needed to Win:

In order to win, a candidate needed to receive (a) 50% of the vote, (greater than 50% in a 2 candidate race), or (b) the most votes, and 10% ahead of his or her nearest opponent.

A note on win number:

In a multi-candidate race, there are several ways of calculating the win number, and this was the approach we felt was the most fair and reflective of membership intention.  We posted this at our website before vote counting began.  We welcome your feedback on this approach, whether you agree, disagree, think the 10% figure should be different, or have a better idea for how votes should be counted in a multi candidate race. Email us at info-at-dfnyc.org.