The mayor spent more than $7 million of his personal fortune in 2003 while attempting to convince the electorate, but 70% of voters opposed the measure. Bloomberg on Thursday recalled how he failed to get support from the major newspaper editorial boards. “I don’t remember getting the support of any good-government group, any party of anybody,” the mayor said. “It’s like crying in the wind.”
Even as he gives up, for now, on one of his signature issues, Bloomberg said Thursday that he wished the status quo would change. “It’s fair to say that because the city is so overwhelmingly one party, the primary in that party will be essentially the election,” he said. Everybody else, members of other parties, voters who don’t participate in primaries, unaffiliated voters, “will be disenfranchised,” Bloomberg said.
Bloomberg, who has switched partisan affiliations twice while in public life, sought to replace party primaries with an open system. Under the proposal rejected by voters in 2003, primaries would have been open to all voters and all candidates, regardless of party membership. The two top vote-getters, even if both belonged to the same party, would compete in a general election.
This method is similar to California's Top-Two that was used for the first time in the 2012 primaries.
A possible new effort in New York City could ask the courts to not fund party primaries. If parties are private entities, why are some tax payers' funding it when they can not take part in the process?
NYC Wins When Everyone Can Vote!
Michael H. Drucker
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3 comments:
Top-two elections and non-partisan elections are entirely different, for two distinct reasons: (1) in a non-partisan system, the first round IS an election. In other words, somebody can (and usually is) elected in the first round. But under top-two, the first round is not an election because no one can be elected at that event. Instead, the only function of the first round in a top-two system is to decide which two candidates are permitted to run in the election itself.
And the other reason non-partisan elections are different from top-two elections is that there are no party labels on the ballot in non-partisan elections, whereas party labels are on the ballot in top-two elections.
The Charter Revision Commission's stated: The Commission staff recommends holding a
nonpartisan primary with the top two vote-getters, regardless of percentage of votes received, advancing to a run-off election to be held on the general election
day. Party labels are optional.
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