Open primary advocates petition to force question on ballot

It might not take a zombie to bring open primaries to New York City.

A group called Unite NY submitted more than 45,000 petitions signed by registered voters to the city clerk’s office on Thursday in support of a ballot question that would allow voters to decide whether to open New York’s closed primary system for municipal elections. Currently, only voters registered in a party holding a primary are allowed to participate.

Under the new proposal, candidates for local office would run in a preliminary election in June. All registered voters would be able to rank up to five candidates in order of preference. The top three finishers would then advance to a general election in November. That election would also use ranked-choice voting.

For the petition to advance to the ballot, it either needs to be taken up by the City Council or the group may need to gather more signatures.

This change would allow more than 1.1 million city voters who are not registered with any party — including a large share of young voters and people of color — to participate in the crucial primary stage of the city’s election process.

“ We think that particularly when you look at what's happening around the country with voter disenfranchisement, it's a fundamental civil rights issue,” said Anthony Thomas, executive director of Unite NY, the nonpartisan nonprofit that submitted the petitions.

“We pursued this through a good old-fashioned canvas and organizing effort because we wanted to go directly to New Yorkers,” he added.

Taking the petition route also allows supporters of opening New York’s primaries to circumvent the Charter Revision Commission process. Commissions are responsible for modernizing the way the city’s government functions and it is through that mechanism that the city has more recently proposed changes to the way it runs local elections.

The commission process is also the source of an ongoing legal fight between the current and former mayoral administrations.

Previous Mayor Eric Adams had set up what’s become known around City Hall as the “Zombie Commission” on his final day in office. The maneuver was seen as an attempt to disrupt the agenda of the incoming Mamdani administration. The commission itself included several former Adams administration staffers and its main agenda item was open primaries.

The Mamdani administration scrapped Adams’ commission using new authority included in the state budget. On Tuesday, members of the zombie commission filed a lawsuit to keep it going. The city has said it plans to defend its position.

Mamdani also convened his own Commission on Government Efficiency, which released its first report on Thursday. The current commission, known at COGE, is expected to develop questions for the ballot this November. That would prevent the citizen-petition question from appearing this year.

A spokesperson for Unite NY, Owen Stone, said the group’s attorneys relied on provisions of the Municipal Home Rule law to guide the petition process. That only permits the petitioners’ question from being bumped for one year.

Legal battles aside, the issue of open primaries has been gaining traction.

As part of last year’s Charter Revision Commission, a final report from the commissioners found that, “Throughout its public hearings, the Commission has heard more testimony on open primaries than on any other subject.”

That commission, which ultimately produced ballot questions related to affordable housing and moving city elections to align with even-year presidential election contests, did not produce a question about open primaries. But the commissioners explained why in their final report.

“The need to reform the closed primary system is crystal clear. But the particular alternative that New York should adopt is not. As a result, the Commission is declining to place a reform proposal on the ballot this November,” they wrote.

Good government leaders who have long supported opening the city’s closed primary system said they applaud this latest effort to force a question on the ballot through a petition.

“ New York City is an outlier nationally when it comes to the structure of our municipal elections,” said Grace Rauh, executive director of Citizens Union and a proponent of open primaries.

She cited cities like Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago and Boston, which all have some version of nonpartisan municipal elections.

“ We think that the voters of New York City should have a choice, which is why we're really excited about this signature gathering campaign and the effort to put open primaries on the ballot so that all New Yorkers can weigh in on this important election reform.”