Drive For Nonpartisan Voting Confronts '03 Failure

The city's Charter Revision Commission on Wednesday night was nearing the end of three hours of expert testimony--most of it about whether nonpartisan elections would be good or bad for New York City's democracy--when Commissioner Ernie Hart raised a practical question.

If a proposal to have nonpartisan elections were put before the voters in 2010, how would the commission do to avoid a repeat of what happened in 2003, when voters rejected such a change by a 70-30 margin?

That's the kind of strategic quandary now facing the 15 mayor-appointed commissioners as they mull ways to improve voter participation in municipal elections, which has dropped almost without interruption since the 1960s. One measure--the percentage of New York's presidential race voters who return for the mayoral race the following year--fell from 67 percent in 2001 to 45 percent in 2009.

Wednesday's testimony--only the second of five "issue forums" where the panel is hearing from policy experts on areas of the charter that might change--raised a host of thorny issues. How much of the turnout problem is due to the mechanics of voting versus the larger political culture? What aspects of the democratic machinery can the charter commission change, given overriding state and federal law? How should the needs of different groups--un-affiliated voters, noncitizens, low-income residents, blacks and Latinos--be addressed? And how will the commission package its proposals come election day?

Supporters of the Independence Party who packed the hearing at Lehman College in the Bronx saw a simple answer to those questions: get rid of closed party primaries that prevent third-party members from voting in the contests that often determine the general election winner, thanks to the Democratic party's enormous registration advantage. They roared in approval of speakers who agreed with them, and hissed and booed those who didn't. And they found support on the expert panel, where two of the five witnesses backed nonpartisan elections.

"Right now, primary elections exclude 752,000 nonaligned voters," said Harry Kresky, a lawyer. And because the winner of the Democratic primary wins most general elections, "1.4 million are excluded," because Republicans also don't get to pick the winner. Kresky, who noted that 43 of the 50 largest U.S. cities and nine of the top 10 have nonpartisan elections, called for a "top two" voting system in which all candidates run in a single race with party identifications, and the top two vote-getters move to a second and decisive round. He rejected open primaries, which exist in several states where parties have voluntarily opened their primaries to voters registered in different parties, because those would still give particular parties outsized influence.

To the question of what is different since voters rejected nonpartisan elections seven years ago, Kresky pointed to Barack Obama's outsider run for the White House. "The political culture has changed, even since 2003," he said.

MIT Professor J. Phillip Thompson also backed nonpartisan elections, arguing that they would be unlikely to diminish black, Latino or low-income turnout, a common concern. To the argument that nonpartisan politics would empower self-financed candidates with little grassroots support, Thompson said: "I think the horse is already out of the barn on that." He added that nonpartisan voting is unlikely to affect mayoral races, but would "open up races at the City Council level."