Mayor de Blasio Pushes Civic Engagement In State of the City

As Mayor Bill de Blasio takes the stage of the Kings Theatre in Brooklyn Tuesday night, he plans to make civic engagement a centerpiece of his State of the City speech — calling on all New Yorkers to get counted and to get out and vote.

In both cases, de Blasio is taking on thorny issues over which the city has only limited control — the upcoming decennial census and voter turnout — while investing city resources to achieve higher levels of participation.

The mayor plans to invest $4.3 million on a campaign to encourage citywide participation in the upcoming 2020 census. The budget includes the appointment of a new Census Coordinator this spring, to oversee a public awareness campaign that will focus in particular on ensuring immigrant and low-income communities are counted.

Just last week, de Blasio signed on to a letter to Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, along with 160 other members of the US Conference of Mayors, urging the Trump administration to adequately fund the census, ensure the process remains devoid of politics and reject a request from the Justice Department to add a citizenship question to the survey.

"This effort is in direct response to what could be a very problematic federal census process that is clearly aimed at under-counting cities like New York," the mayor’s spokesman, Eric Phillips, told WNYC. "Rather than accept becoming a victim of that process, the Mayor’s going to do all he can to combat it and fight for our city’s political representation and power."

Additionally, the mayor plans to announce the city’s first Chief Democracy Officer, who will tackle the ongoing problem of low voter turnout in the city. In the last election, less than 22 percent of registered New Yorkers turned out to vote, compared with 55 percent in 1993.

The new CDO will amplify the city’s voter registration efforts, retraining front-line staff at city agencies on voting rights and revamping the distribution, collection and submission of voter registration forms.

Both the CDO and the new Census Coordinator will report to the Office of the Chief of Staff, led by Emma Wolfe.

The de Blasio administration has pushed for electoral changes on the state level in recent years, urging the legislature to adopt items such as early voting, same-day voter registration, automatic voter registration and electronic poll books. But those reforms have faced opposition in the Republican-controlled state Senate. The CDO will continue to push the administration’s electoral reform agenda.

In a sign of some progress on the state level, Governor Cuomo announced Monday a 30-day budget amendment that would fund early voting across the state. The amendment provides $7 million in the upcoming budget to allow each of the state's 62 counties to offer one open polling site in the 12 days leading up to Election Day.

New York is one of only 13 states without any form of early voting.