The New York City Charter Revision Commission will hold a series of public issue forums across the five boroughs throughout May and June 2010. Topics for each forum, which were selected by the Commission at its May 10th public meeting, include: Term Limits, Voter Participation, Government Structure, Public Integrity, and Land Use. At each forum, the Commission will hear expert testimony and will invite public input. Each issue forum is open to the public and will be streamed live via webcast through their website, Wednesday, June 2 – VOTER PARTICIPATION (Nonpartisan Municipal Elections) will take place at Lehman College, 250 Bedford Park Boulevard West, Music Building, Faculty Dining Room, Bronx at 6 p.m.
Mayor Bloomberg, a registered independent, has said he will push for the idea again this year only if there is sufficient support for it to win at the ballot box, and he has already found some unexpected allies.
The Rev. Al Sharpton, a Democrat who opposed nonpartisan elections in 2003, said in an interview that he had “agreed to revisit the issue” and would convene a meeting of community leaders to discuss the idea in the coming weeks. “It’s a conversation I think we need to have,” Mr. Sharpton said. To a large degree, the 2003 battle centered on Mr. Bloomberg, then a fresh-face mayor, and what many viewed as his crusade to redraw the political landscape. Mr. Sharpton said that with Mr. Bloomberg in his third and presumably final term, the question of nonpartisan elections “is not about him. It becomes a depersonalized fight about principles.”
Citizens Union, a government watchdog that also opposed nonpartisan elections in 2003, said that it, too, would reconsider the measure, especially after the historically low voter turnout for the 2009 citywide election. “We are concerned about the decline in voter participation,” said Dick Dadey, the executive director of the group. “Given our interest in election reform broadly, we want to revisit the issue of nonpartisan elections as a possible solution to that.”
Several Republican leaders have also expressed openness to the idea, or outright support for it, including Councilman Eric A. Ulrich, of Queens, and Jay Savino, the chairman of the Bronx Republican Party.
Supporters, including leaders of the city’s Independence Party, said that party politics had outlived its usefulness in city elections, and now blocked an estimated 800,000 unaffiliated voters from participating in primaries. In many races, especially for City Council, the primaries are a de facto general election, because the winner faces no serious opponent and cruises toward victory in November. In most nonpartisan election systems, all registered voters can cast a ballot for any candidate in the first round (which replaces a traditional party primary), and the top two finishers compete in the second round. (Over three-fourths of the twenty largest cities in the U.S. have non-partisan elections - mhd), including Chicago, Boston, Los Angeles, Detroit, and Dallas have adopted some form of it. “It’s not very radical,” said Fred Newman, a leader in the city Independence Party.
Over the last few months, Howard Wolfson, the deputy mayor for government and communications, and Bradley Tusk, Mr. Bloomberg’s former campaign manager, have tried to gauge public support for the issue. Mr. Wolfson said the mayor “supports nonpartisan elections, but has concerns about the feasibility of recommending that the issue be on the ballot this November.” He said the decision about how to proceed was up to the Charter Revision Commission. Mr. Wolfson’s role has put him on the opposite side of the 2003 debate, when he led the Democratic Party’s extensive — and ultimately successful — efforts to defeat nonpartisan elections in New York City.
Use the above link to read, both for and against the issue, in the entire article By MICHAEL BARBARO, The New York Times.
Michael H. Drucker
Technorati Tag in Del.icio.us 
No comments:
Post a Comment