Media Advisory: Women Legislators and Groups Join in Support of Fair Elections Press Event: Wednesday, March 5th in Albany!

Albany, NY - Please join the Fair Elections for New York Campaign, Senate Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins, NYC Public Advocate Tish James, Members of the New York State Senate and Assembly, and women's rights advocates to call for Fair Elections, a public financing system for state elections in the final 2014 budget.

Fair Elections is supported by a vast majority of women in the New York State Senate and Assembly, and is a women's issue that can be accomplished in this budget.

WHEN: Wednesday, March 5, 2014

TIME: 12:00 noon

WHERE: Steps of the Million Dollar Staircase, 3rd Floor of the NYS Capitol

For more information and to RSVP to join this press event, call Jess Wisneski at 845-901-0264 or email:jwisneski@citizenactionny.org.

For women in particular, this kind of reform is vital to participation in politics. We know that when women are elected to office, they fight for and win passage of issues that deeply affect women and their families. Although we have come so far in the last 100 years, women are still drastically underrepresented in our country’s capital and your own. Indeed, 160 years after the Seneca Falls Convention and the birth of the women’s right movement in New York, women hold only 18 percent of the seats in the New York State Senate, and 25 percent in the State Assembly. These numbers are shamefully low.

We know public campaign financing encourages and facilitates women running for office. In fact, five of six states with public financing of elections (Arizona, Connecticut, Hawaii, Maine, Minnesota and Nebraska) have a higher percentage of women representatives in state legislative bodies than the national average. The first Governor elected with a full public financing system was a woman: Janet Napolitano of Arizona. And New York City’s robust system of public financing recently helped elect two women of color as top city-wide leaders: Public Advocate Tish James and City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito.

New York State can be the next to pass a Fair Elections system in the 2014 budget.