New York City voters have five proposals on the backs of their ballots courtesy of Mayor Mamdani’s Commission on Government Efficiency (COGE), convened earlier this year. We think that these small bores changes to the City Charter will all likely pass and we equally think that they won’t have much impact.
This was a wasted chance to really change NYC government. Mamdani only set COGE up to block a vote on nonpartisan elections, also called open primaries. That would expand democracy, even as Donald Trump tries to restrict it.
The five measures offered by COGE are not all bad.
We have called on a streamlined process for outdoor dining many times, recognizing that the current structure disincentivizes restaurants and cafés from setting up what was one of the only silver linings of the COVID era. We’re all for putting those through the usual revocable public space process and speeding that process in ways that still retain public input, as the first question calls for. We’re also in favor of faster street redesigns to actually address traffic problem areas and think the city should set aside more in rainy day funds (but the fiscal experts at the Citizens Budget Commission make a convincing argument that Proposal 5’s rainy day fund is far too weak and urge a No vote.)
There was a ballot proposal on nonpartisan elections put forward by a commission appointed by outgoing Mayor Eric Adams, but Mamdani blocked that with the help of the Legislature. And there is another, from the group Unite NY that has been gathering signatures for a nonpartisan ballot initiative. But COGE took precedence and bumped it.
In a city like New York, in which the Democratic primary is most often the only election that matters, nonpartisan elections make sense to give all registered voters a full slate of choices, building on the momentum of our ranked-choice primaries. As it stands, only registered party voters can participate, locking out voters that are unaffiliated or enrolled in other parties. So, come general election time, the choice has largely already been made for them.
Most peer U.S. cities already have nonpartisan elections and there’s no reason for New York not to join them other than to preserve the vestiges of our machine politics system and to shut out more than a million voters from meaningful participation.
Fears that this will lead to people voting for spoilers or otherwise engaging in strategic manipulation are overwrought; voters mostly vote for the people they want to see elected, and this system would give them a more meaningful ability to exercise that choice and still cast a more strategic ballot in the general election.
Next year will be another opportunity to put the nonpartisan question to the voters. While there won’t be a big-ticket election for mayor or Congress or anything of the sort, there’ll be a municipal election for judges and three DAs, and the nonpartisan election question can also go on that ballot. The mayor got his five ballot questions this time around and should let this question go before the voters next year, where they can make their own choices about whether they want to join Boston, L.A., Chicago and other cities in running elections this way.