The group Voters For Animal Rights help elect candidates who support animal protection, lobby for strong laws to stop animal cruelty, and hold elected officials accountable.
ANIMALS 24-7: While the races for the U.S. Presidency, control of the Senate and House of Representatives grip the nation on Election Day 2020, animal advocates also have a lot to watch on state and local ballots in New York state and the cities of Berkeley, California, and Denver, Colorado.
Buoyed by October 2019 success in persuading the New York City Council to ban the sale of foie gras from force-fed ducks and geese and create a Mayor’s Office of Animal Welfare within the city government, Voters for Animal Rights founder and president Allie Feldman Taylor has “endorsed more than 50 animal rights candidates for state senate and assembly in every region of New York State,” she told members by email on October 31, 2020.
Voters for Animal Rights hopes to help elect candidates ”representing farming communities, urban jungles, industrial communities, seaside communities and more,” Feldman Taylor wrote, “because if we want to start winning laws at the statewide level, we need to have allies in every corner of the Empire State.”
The November 3, 2020 national election will be the first test of whether a New York City-based animal rights organization can claim enough support anywhere outside the big city to influence the outcome of elections elsewhere.
Though Voters for Animal Rights may not have more than a few hundred members in any precinct outside New York City, state senate and assembly races are often decided by small enough margins that even a few hundred votes could be significant.
Even within New York City, swinging a few hundred votes sometimes makes a difference, as longtime animal advocate Garo Alexanian demonstrated in 1994, unseating seven-term Republican member of the House of Representatives Bill Green with a single well-timed mailing. Green (1929-2002) had represented the New York City “garment district,” and had tended to politically favor the fur trade. SOURCE…
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