CANDIDATE ACCOUNTABILITY PROJECT
STATEMENT
May 7, 2007

FIn fulfilling its mission to provide information to the voters of New York about the candidates running for elected office, Citizens Union since 1910 has evaluated and supported candidates who seem most capable of successfully addressing issues of particular importance at the time and advancing the public interest of good government and political reform.

Recent practice has also led CU to evaluate elected officials on how well they have worked to address the issues and achieve political reform, and now will include in its evaluation whether or not elected officials have conducted a public self evaluation. We have made our views known about the candidates through the nearly century old practice of publishing a voters directory a few weeks before each primary and general election.

On the occasion of Mayor Michael Bloomberg issuing another one of his self evaluations to the voters, we announce a new effort aimed at increasing accountability in the actions of government by calling upon all city and state elected officials to provide voters periodic self-evaluations of how they have performed against the promises they made during their campaigns for office. We also are announcing that we will begin to include as part of our overall evaluation of candidates whether incumbents have conducted an examination of their own actions against the promises they made and reported how well they did to their voters.

Over the past several years, we have more clearly defined the reform and policy issues, and the criteria, we use in assessing candidates’ fitness for office. Our actions today are but just one more step in our efforts to hold elected officials accountable for the promises they make. The issue is not whether one agrees with the promises made by a candidate or with what they have done to implement them. The issue is public officials making information available to the pubic to enable the public to evaluate their performance. We commend Mayor Bloomberg for his leadership in reporting back to voters how well he thinks he has done to fulfill his campaign promises so that voters have a more informed basis for judging him.”

Holding elected officials accountable for their pledges and actions has been a mainstay of Citizens Union’s century long work on behalf of the public interest. By now calling upon elected officials to also hold themselves publicly accountable by conducting their own self-evaluations, we hope voters will have more information to better judge them against the promises made during previous campaigns. Ideally, candidates would report to their voters periodically, but at a minimum they should report at least once on how well they have done before seeking re-election or election to another office.

As part of our future candidate evaluation work over the next several years, CU will begin to ask elected officials to provide evidence of such a self-evaluation so that we can include that knowledge in our own evaluation. We believe that such self-evaluations will serve as an effective tool in bringing greater integrity to the actions of elected officials and go a long way toward building stronger public trust in the affairs of government.