UNION SQUARE — An East Village woman is doing her part to ensure that New Yorkers show up in force to vote in the upcoming presidential race, giving hundreds of registration forms to passersby from her perch on 14th Street.
Karen Hofnan, 73, spent four hours on Tuesday posted up in a beach chair outside the 14th Street Trader Joe’s handing out forms, giving instructions when needed and knitting in her downtime.
A naturalized citizen who moved to the United States from Germany as a child, Hofnan said she just wants to do her part to make sure that whomever is elected in November has the greatest possible mandate to lead.
“Basically I can live with whoever is elected if a real majority of the American people chose them,” she said.
Hofnan got the idea to to set up outside the store after talking with a cashier at Trader Joe’s who said she wasn’t sure how to register in time to vote in the primary. So Hofnan stopped by the Board of Elections, picked up a stack of registration forms, set up her chair on 14th Street, and got to work.
By 2:45 p.m. Hofnan said she had handed out about 200 forms, and had already made another trip to the Board of Elections for another stack of forms.
(New York has a closed primary, so people wishing to vote in the Democratic or Republican primaries need to register with their preferred party by March 25. Voting day for the primaries is April 19.)
Hofnan's goal on Tuesday was not to get any one candidate elected but to make sure as many people as possible get to have a say. She said she has a preferred candidate picked out, but declined to say who she was pulling for.
“You don’t want someone else making that decision for you,” she said. “I have my own doubts about the political machine, but somebody will make that decision, so how can you complain if you don’t vote?”
Slightly more than 50 percent of voting-age Americans voted in the last presidential election, coming in lower than other developed countries, according to a 2015 report by the Pew Research Center. That dismal number does not sit right with Hofnan, who said she became a citizen and registered to vote as soon as she possibly could.
By 3 p.m., Hofnan was ready to call it a day, but she pledged to return with more forms to continue her mission.
“I think it’s appalling, nobody has such a poor record as we do,” she said. “People died for the right to vote, in the civil rights movement and the women fighting 40 years before that. If nothing else I want to honor them.”
