By Jill Colvin
DNAinfo Reporter/Producer
MANHATTAN — Less than a week before election day, many New Yorkers still don't know about two ballot measures that are up for vote — let alone the fact that they will have to turn their ballot over to answer the two questions.
On Tuesday, voters will have the chance to weigh in on two referendums: One asks whether local elected officials should be capped at serving two terms; the second contains eight separate proposals, including decreasing the number of signatures it takes to get on the ballot and other administrative issues.
The questions will be printed on the back of printed ballots, separate from where voters choose their candidates.
But many are still in the dark about the measures and officials are growing increasingly concerned.
"We need to get the word out," said Public Advocate Bill de Blasio, who spent Wednesday morning handing out flyers with his staffers in Union Square, urging people to turn over their ballots and weigh in on the term limits measure. De Blasio has long been a critic of Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s push to have the City Council extend the limits so he could run for a third term.
"The notion that there's something on the back of the ballot is totally foreign… It's a shocker to them," he said.
David Lee, 30, a police officer who lives in Brooklyn, said he’d never heard of the ballot measures before Wednesday.
"I had no idea," said Lee, 30, who now plans to vote to restore the two-term limit.
Harlem resident Michael Holmes, 61 said he hadn't heard anything about the questions or where to find them either.
"I wouldn't have found it on the back of the ballot if you hadn’t told me,” he said.
Ursula Ramirez, a senior policy associate in de Blasio's office, who was one of 25 staffers and volunteers who handed out more than 3,000 fliers at stops across the city, said that 95 percent of the people she’d spoken with were in the dark about the measures, too.
De Blasio faulted the City’s Board of Elections for failing to do enough to educate voters about the measures, despite hundreds of demonstrations throughout the city and millions spent on ad campaigns.
"It’s been sorely lacking," de Blasio said.
A Board of Elections spokeswoman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
De Blasio said the ballot measure issue will be compounded by the fact that this is the first time that most voters will use the city’s new optical scanning voting machines, which require them to fill out paper ballots and feed them into scanning machines, instead of the old lever ballots.
But Union Square resident Sudheer Desai, 70, said he's well aware of his choices and plans to vote to restore two term limits on Election Day.
"I think he's a hypocrite," Desai said of the mayor, who has said he will vote in favor of returning to two terms. "This is absurd."
Even de Blasio is hopeful that, in he end, the measure will pass.
"[Voters] care about the issue. They felt ripped off in 2008. They want to get their voices heard," he said.
