Lerner.

It's election days like yesterday that Susan Lerner both lives for and dreads. The executive director of Common Cause left the house at 3:30 a.m. She spent the wee hours of the election morning printing out thousands of fliers alerting people to the voter hotline that the New York Public Interest Research Group (NYPIRG) were manning along with Lerner and her associates in Common Cause to field  calls about voting problems. It has been a joint election protection effort of NYPIRG and Common Cause for more than 20 years, and a solo NYPIRG effort before that time.

By 9 a.m. she had 60 volunteers manning phones that never stopped ringing, not even for a second. 

"We just got a report from Ditmas Park; people are getting angry," Ms. Lerner told a volunteer poll monitor who called in from Park Slope. "People don't know about the affidavit ballots, they aren't even being told they exist. People are starting to hit each other."

Common Cause and NYPIRG are polling police of Election Day. Under normal circumstances, the team goes to locations to keep folks moving and answer questions about Assembly and election districts, for example.

Yesterday, there was barely a location that hadn't been getting complaints about broken scanners, long lines, untrained poll workers or a lack of affidavits.

"We urge people to not give up, to not leave without voting," Ms. Lerner said. "If they have flexible timing, we suggest a time to come back that might be better. The worst thing for this process if for people to get frustrated and leave without casting a ballot."

"Is that line very long, or is that line moving?" Christina, a  young volunteer with dreads was asking someone on her cellphone. "Okay, I'll pass that message along." The issue was 133 East 13th Street, a poll site short on poll workers and long on lines.

Another young man came in two seconds later: PS167, which had not received ballots this morning, had ballots. Now the location just needed machines.

"Get everyone to fill out affidavits," said NYPIRG Government Reform Coordinator, Neal Rosenstein. For a moment, we were confused as to whether he was speaking to the person in the room or the one on the phone cocked against his ear.

At 40 West 20th Street, a polling place at a public library was turning away "hundreds of people," according to one caller. Two minutes later, another complaint about that location came in. A decision was made to send a poll monitor to the location to assess the problem and reach out to the BOE, to which NYPIRG and the Common Cause have a direct line.

From Soho, a complaint came in and Mr. Rosenstein read it out loud: "It looks like a third-world country. Only two poll workers."

A short while later, a young man in a baseball hat rushed in, waving a complaint sheet. A woman had brought her 90-year-old parents with her to a "supersite" polling location. The parents, displaced by the storm, needed affidavit ballots. The woman asked if they could sit down, or jump the line. The poll workers were not only not accommodating, they berated the would-be voter and kept the parents standing in the three-hour-plus line. The woman wound up calling not just the hotline, but the NYPD as well.

"Where was this?" Ms. Lerner asked.

"M.S. 51." Everyone groaned. The Park Slope location had the most angry calls throughout the day. I.D. checks, Spanish translation issues, lines so long that people left instead of voting.

"The place is having a meltdown," Ms. Lerner said. Poll monitors had already been dispatched to the area, and the police had responded by showing up as well. Mr. Rosenstein left our small room to host a volunteer training session. As he headed out, someone's big black dog went poking around his backpack.

"Who brought a dog into the center?" Ms. Lerner asked, more amused than annoyed.

Maybe it's a watchdog, we suggested.

Another urgent phone call. From the Soho location on Broome Street. And a rash of calls from  from Suffolk County, where people have been turned away from affidavit voting. And so on. It was 1:30—and still more than seven hours to go.

The campaign-finance gurus over at NYPIRG however have run their numbers and they say that Rice's methodology is flawed. Campaigns do not have to itemize how much they have raised from donors who give under $100, and so there is no way of knowing, as Rice's campaign claims, that just 12 percent of Eric Schneiderman's campaign donations were from donors who gave less than $100, or that just 16 percent of Sean Coffey's money come from low-dollar, grassroots donations.

According to Bill Mahoney, a researcher with NYPIRG, 99.9 percent of campaigns in New York State do not list donors under $100, since there is simply too much paperwork and the law does not require it. By listing each of her two-digit dollar amount and under donors, Rice inflated her number of donors when compared side-by-side with her competitors.

"If she itemized all of her contributions, no matter how small, she was able to add several hundred donors to her total," he said. "She says, for example, that Eric Schneiderman received 129 donations, but he definitely received more than that. We just have no way of knowing how many he received because he did not itemize his donations."

In fact, Mahoney says, when comparing apples to apples--when comparing how much money from checks $100 or under each campaign received as a percentage of their fundraising this calendar--Rice has received the least of any of the candidates, with just .61 percent of her total money raised coming from small donors. The candidate whose war chest is the most filled with small dollar donations is Richard Brodsky, who has raised close to 3% of his total from small checks.

The Rice campaign meanwhile noted that they had more small donor cash than their competitors, and said that they itemized each of their donations not to inflate their totals but for transparency's sake.

"We think grassroots support and transparency are good things," said Eric Phillips, Rice's spokesman. "According to these public reports, we have far more donors and far more low-dollar, grassroots contributions than any other candidate in the race. I don't think this is a function of other campaigns lacking transparency, but a function of our grassroots support.  But there's no doubt that we're proud to have been the most transparent and the most detailed in our disclosure report."

"My understanding is we're actually looking at a new bill that has elements from all of the different passages that have actually been presented and as I said before I think that is a positive development," said Susan Lerner, the executive director of Common Cause. "Both houses have this problem, and both houses have to step forward jointly. No more one-house bills."

The Assembly has passed a "turn back the clock" bill that would blow up the Commission on Public Integrity and diffuse enforcement responsibilities across multiple agencies. Democrats controlling the State Senate considered the same bill as well as some further-reaching chapter amendments in September, but down a member, they laid it aside when it was clear Republicans would not provide any votes for the amendments. They opted to have no loaf instead of half.

No matter. A Senate source familiar with the negotiations said a new bill drafted in that chamber--and the threat of its introduction--prompted negotiations to start again with the Assembly and David Paterson.

"We hope the kumbaya moment happens soon," said Blair Horner, the legislative director for NYPIRG. He and Lerner joined Dick Dadey of Citizens Union which found in a new report, not surprisingly, that the number of legislators leaving office for ethical misconduct is increasing. The bill is not on the agenda for this special session, however, though the good-government groups hope a vote will happen as quickly as possible. Legislators are actually feeling incentivized to do something about ethics, as recent elections showed a strong anti-incumbent sentiment and polls show they are perceived by voters as a giant morass of dysfunctionality.

Horner said the current enforcement provisions--the Legislative Ethics Commission, controlled by legislators, is responsible for policing other legislators and does nothing--is inadequate.

"It's sort of Lake Wobegon-like enforcement where everyone is above average," Horner said.

It turns out there are lots of pots of campaign money out there, just sitting, some being spent, controlled by elected officials who have left office and are unlikely (at best) to return.

Bill Mahoney at NYPIRG put together the above spreadsheet. I asked some of the people on it—several of whom are lobbyists—what they used the money for.

"I haven't liquidated it because, frankly, I haven't ruled out ever running for public office again," said former State Senator Ray Meier, now an attorney with Bond, Schoeneck and King. "Lobbyists make political contributions, so you can ask the broader question, is it proper for lobbyists to make political contributions?"

Good-government advocates—including NYPIRG—have said that accounts should be closed when the officeholder leaves office. Election law allows for campaign funds to be expended for any lawful purpose, which includes legal fees, politically related trips or pretty much anything short of financing arms sales.

Meier could, theoretically, make another run for office. But what about Brian McLaughlin, an ex-assemblyman? The 57-year-old lawmaker was sentenced to 10 years in prison for stealing money and taking kickbacks. His campaign account contains $732,000; it paid attorney (and Senate staffer) Josh Ehrlich $10,000 in the last six-month reporting period.

"I have a contract with the committee, and as I have to do filings or deal with things, I get paid," Ehrlich told me, noting he's been under contract for three years. "I had to deal with the board, I had to deal with the bank. It is what it is."

John Faso, a lawyer and lobbyist with Manatt, Phelps and Phillips, told me his spending over $16,000 these past six months is "entirely appropriate."

"There's no law or regulation against it. I had money left over from my campaign—being a fiscal conservative, I didn't go into debt in any race I've ever run," he said. It's just simply where I may be asked to go speak somewhere in conjunction with someone's candidacy, or if a candidate who's supported me in the past, in particular, is running for office, then I try to reciprocate that support."

"I don't think there's anything that's untoward or illegitimate about that," Faso, who has run for governor and comptroller and may someday run for something else, said. "As a percentage of the total amount I raised, very small amounts were left. We budgeted that way, because you always have unanticipated expenses that occurred at the end of the campaign. It's a worthwhile approach towards budgeting in general that I think individuals and campaigns should adopt."

The largest chunk of that money came from business interests and unions, but the following list—compiled by NYPIRG's campaign data guru Bill Mahoney—shows the 115 donors who each gave more than the average per capita income in the state ($23,389). Together, they gave over $6.3 million.

"It's a small number of people giving big checks. So you're starting to see a picture of who funds Albany: it's powerful interest groups, corporations, trade associations, unions and the last part of the picture are big donations, presumably from wealthy individuals," said Blair Horner, NYPIRG's legislative director.

Not entirely surprisingly, the top donor is Michael Bloomberg.

High on the list are lobbyist Patricia Lynch, financier George Soros (and several relatives) as well as supermarket mogul and potential mayoral candidate John Catsimatidis.

Barbara Bartoletti, legislative director of the League of Women Voters, repeated her call to reform campaign finance, but noted that the governor and legislative leaders are "all of one mind" and that with the Democrats controlling all three points of power, "the political excuses no longer exist."

Enforcement of the current laws are very lax, Bartoletti said, noting State Senator Pedro Espada, Jr. is still not in compliance for the last election cycle.

Here's the full list.

According to Legislative Director Blair Horner, Obama worked for a semester at the organization's City College branch in 1985, after he graduated from Columbia College. (He's the first Columbia College alum to be President, too.)

"You hope he does a good job," Horner said. "I think it's probably fair to say that since he was here for probably a short period of time, it's not quite the same as someone who's been here or 15 years. It's significant, but at the end of the day, you hope he does a good job."

Fox5 recently did a feature on this, which you can find here.

Golisano, who pledged yesterday to put $5 million towards State Senate races, mainly in western New York, says he's launching a political action committee. Horner said the problem may be that laws surrounding P.A.C.s do not allow them to coordinate with campaigns at all.

Golisano, by his own admission, has already met with some campaigns.

"It's pretty murky," Horner said.

“The congestion pricing plan proposed by Mayor Bloomberg failed to gain approval in the State Legislature in the spring,” said Kellner, who was a vocal proponent of congestion pricing. "Neither the plan’s supporters nor its critics seem to have a firm idea of what to do next.”

Before introducing the panelists, he explained that they had invited a representative from the M.T.A. (“Just so it didn’t seem like we were M.T.A.-bashing"), but the authority “chose not to participate.”

The evening's guests included labor lawyer Theodore Kheel (later introduced as “a great hero from the last century in mass transit”), Gene Russianoff of the NYPIRG Straphangers Campaign and Jeffrey Zupan from the Regional Plan Association. They sat onstage in front of an audience of about 40, passing two semi-effective microphones back and forth.

“I personally supported congestion pricing as well as the millionaires' tax,” Kellner said, “because I believe New York is really facing a traffic and mass transit crisis requiring decisive action.”

He then passed both microphones to Kheel, who is 93 years old, and whose past in New York’s transit agencies is legendary. Kheel also made headlines recently when he proposed using revenue from congestion pricing to make mass transit totally free.

On the politics of congestion pricing, Kheel said, “The promotion, I thought, was in the wrong order. If you start out with free transit, you start out with something people would welcome.”

Russianoff said, “The M.T.A. is in the middle of a gigantic financial crisis. I don’t believe they’re crying wolf, I believe they have tremendous problems.”

He went on to say that only once before, in 1980 and '81, were there fare hikes during consecutive years (as there likely will be in 2007 and 2008) and that the M.T.A. is the fifth largest borrower in the U.S.

Jeffery Zupan took the microphone and said with some amusement, “The M.T.A. is in deep doo-doo right now and it’s only going to get worse."

After the panel, Zupan told me he thought Bloomberg was brave to have raised the issue of congestion pricing. "People thought it was politically impossible,” Zupan commented.

He thinks the problem was in the timing.

“It was kept pretty secret, so it dropped, with PlaNYC, like a bombshell, because they didn’t share thinking."

I caught Kellner on his way out and asked him about Bloomberg's legacy.

“The two things he’s going to be known for as mayor are going to be more tickets and garbage trucks,” Kellner said. Later, he added that he would also be remembered for "things falling out of the sky.”

Here's the statement:

UPDATE: Here's Cuomo's statement:

Supporters of congestion pricing are taking issue with the methodology of a new Quinnipiac poll which showed New Yorkers split on the issue.

“Asking people if they want to pay more to drive without explaining what they are paying for doesn't tell us anything we didn't already know,” said Kathy Wylde, president and CEO of the Partnership for NYC.

“When New Yorkers learn of the many benefits that come from congestion pricing, they become supporters,“ said Gene Russianoff of NYPIRG/Straphangers Campaign, a member of the 80-plus groups in the Campaign for New York’s Future.

Transporation advocate and blogger Aaron Naparstek has more criticism of the poll here.

I'm waiting for a response from Quinnipiac.