Voters pay scant attention to runoff

By N. Clark Judd

For several weeks now, Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz has appeared in a TV ad in which he answers the question: What’s a Yassky?

Many people in the Riverdale/ Kingsbridge area must not have been watching, because although City Councilman David Yassky’s local supporters were out on the street during Tuesday’s runoff election in the hopes of getting him the Democratic city comptroller nomination, it was hard to find anyone who knew or was interested.

“Is that someone’s name?” asked Corey Scagliola, 27, who works in Riverdale and lives in Queens.

Standing on Johnson Avenue at West 235th Street — just blocks away from a polling place at The Arbor, the failed condominium complex that is now a dorm for Columbia University graduate students — Mr. Scagliola said he pays little attention to city politics.

“Just the other day I was joking with my friends about what a comptroller does,” said Mr. Scagliola, a fifth grade teacher.

Tom McNeil, a staffer for Assemblyman Jeffrey Dinowitz, was on the corner across the street, handing out flyers touting Mr. Yassky’s accomplishments. He did so just steps from a large banner affixed to a lamppost that also explained why voters should go to the polls for the councilman, who represents Brooklyn Heights.

Mr. McNeil said the campaigning was going slowly.

He held out a flyer to an approaching woman. She bunched up her shoulders.

“I live in Orange County,” she explained, and kept walking.

Melissa Bauer and Nancy Cheren, buttonholed by a reporter cater-corner to the Johnson Avenue Starbucks, explained they were suffering from voter fatigue.

“I got so much stuff people put on my doorknobs,” explained Ms. Cheren. After weeks of being bombarded by campaign materials, neither she nor Ms. Bauer could see any appreciable difference between Mr. Yassky and John Liu, the councilman from Flushing, who competed Tuesday for the Democratic goahead to become comptroller.

The winner gets to do it all again against Republican opponent Joe Mendola in November.

City Councilman Bill de Blasio was also in a runoff election Tuesday, hoping to gain the Democratic nomination for public advocate in the face of competition from the first public advocate, Mark Green, who wants his old job back. But nobody on Johnson Avenue was handing out flyers for either public advocate candidate.

The whole process involved too much voting, Ms. Bauer and Ms. Cheren said. “You already voted once,” Ms. Bauer began.

Ms. Cheren finished, incredulous, “and now I have to do it again?”

A Department of Sanitation worker arrived with a razor, parked his city-owned Prius, and cut down the Yassky sign. As he threw it into the trunk of the Prius, on top of a similarly confiscated poster for an energy drink, he declined to comment on how many posters he had taken down that day.

Earlier that morning, Mr. Dinowitz himself was reached by phone as he drove to Woodlawn in search of less apathetic voters.

“[Voters] are a little hard to find,” Mr. Dinowitz said.

His campaign staff was also at work in Kingsbridge, where one worker reported little interest and one or two people who politely informed her that they were Republicans.

This is part of the October 1, 2009 online edition of The Riverdale Press.

Have an opinion on this matter? We'd like to hear from you. Click here.