To the detriment of more than a million of its citizens, New York City is one of few big American cities with closed primaries, limiting who can vote for mayor and other local offices in the election that counts the most.
New Yorkers must be allowed a choice to instituting open primaries — also called nonpartisan elections — and a petition drive by the government reform group Unite NY will make that referendum happen either this November or next fall. That is something to celebrate. Thank you, Unite NY.
There is overwhelming strong public support for letting all registered voters, regardless of party, to vote in the June primaries for City Council, borough president and the three citywide offices mayor, public advocate and comptroller. That is how it works in L.A. and Chicago and Boston and down the line. New York is an outlier, excluding the 1.1 million voters who are not enrolled in a party.
The 2025 city Charter Revision Commission, appointed by Mayor Eric Adams and chaired by Rich Buery, heard pleas from large numbers of New Yorkers to move to nonpartisan elections/open primaries. The panel came very close to putting such a question on the 2025 ballot but was threatened that their other important proposals, dealing with speeding housing construction, would be opposed, so they backed down.
In their final report and meeting a majority of the Buery panel expressed support for open primaries and said that a future commission should advance it.
Adams appointed another commission in his final hours in office, spearheaded by his first deputy mayor, Randy Mastro. That panel did adopt a nonpartisan elections/open primaries proposal and sent it to the City Clerk on May 27, which was the same day that Mayor Mamdani evoked a new state law meant to neuter the Adams/Mastro panel. The next day, May 28, Mamdani selected a new commission chaired by Patrick Gaspard, clearly meant to supersede the Adams/Mastro group.
The Mastro panel sued to invalidate the state law last week and the Gaspard panel presented its ideas, which do not include nonpartisan elections/open primaries, even though it was a dominant theme of those people who testified in hearings around the city.
Led by allies of the mayor, the Gaspard commission will certainly not support nonpartisan elections/open primaries, but now that doesn’t matter. And neither does the outcome of the Mastro lawsuit because of the signatures collected by Unite NY. Using the state Municipal Home Rule Sections 36 and 37, Unite NY will force the issue and succeed in a referendum even if Mastro loses in court.
They collected 52,000 signatures and submitted 45,000 of them, 50% more than the 30,000 needed. The law allows the City Council to respond by placing the question on the ballot (which is unlikely). Should the Council decline, if Unite NY then submits at least another 15,000 signatures, the matter will go to the ballot.
A mayoral Charter Revision Commission (either Mastro or Gaspard) would bump it off the ballot, but the bump can only be for one year. If so, it would appear on the November 2027 ballot. So the voters will get to vote for nonpartisan elections/open primaries this fall (if Mastro wins in court) or next fall (via the Unite NY signature route). And that’s a huge win for democracy and more open government.