Election Reform
New Yorkers should be able to vote for any candidate they choose, in free and fair elections.—Larry Sharpe
Elections should be free and fair. Larry Sharpe’s Election Reform approach accomplishes this by reforming New York’s Ballot Access Laws, creating Open Primaries, and instituting Ranked Choice Voting.
Ballot Access Reform
The voters of New York deserve to have real choices on their ballots.
Recently, an appointed commission set up by former Governor Cuomo decided to change New York election law to add some of the most restrictive ballot access requirements in the country. They must have decided that Democrats had too much competition on the ballot…
By changing the Ballot Access requirements to lessen the burden of petition gathering, candidates won’t have to waste valuable time and resources on an outdated and oppressive practice that does nothing but eliminate real competition in the voting booth.
Open Primaries
Individual voters should pick the candidates on the ballot -not party bosses.
Voters should be able to vote for whoever they wish -regardless of party affiliation.
With an Open Primary system, New Yorkers can vote for any primary candidate no matter what party they are affiliated with.
Ranked Choice Voting
No more “spoilers”. No more voting for the “lesser of two evils”.
• With Ranked-Choice Voting, you rank your favorite candidates in order of preference.
• Only prefer a single candidate? Not a problem! With Ranked-Choice Voting, you rank as many -or as few- candidates as you want.
• RCV is also called an “instant runoff” election -meaning if your first choice is eliminated, your second choice gets your vote in the runoff, and so on. When a candidate gets a majority, that candidate is elected.
• This means no candidate is a spoiler, and the candidate that wins is ALWAYS supported by a majority of the voters.
Ranked Choice Voting ensures that there are no wasted votes, and that candidates must build a broad coalition of voters.