Mayor's First Misstep?
Costikyan Claims Non-Partisan Elections Are No Good For New York
By Joseph Mercurio
August 2, 2002
Recently Edward N. Costikyan wrote of "the mayor's first misstep" in an Op-Ed "The Case Against Bloomberg's Charter Revisions" in The New York Sun. The column, however, makes the case for why non-partisan elections are not a problem for political parties.
Costikyan's important book on New York politics, Behind Closed Doors: Politics in the Public Interest, published in 1966, is still as good read. He was a Democratic District Leader in Murray Hill, and later became reform leader of Tammany Hall with the support of Mayor Robert F. Wagner. He managed the Democratic Party's mayoral campaign in 1965 -- the year East Side Republican Congressman John V. Lindsay won.
Forty-one years ago Costikyan headed a task force that drafted revisions to the City Charter, which were implemented in 1975. The notion of non-partisan elections was debated at length and the noted professor from Long Island University, Max Lehman, was called upon to take an in-depth look at non-partisan elections.
Clearly we have been studying non-partisan elections for some time now. "Googoo" (good government) groups like NYPIRG should stop saying we do not have enough time and get into a substantive discussion of the merits of non-partisan elections -- or risk being labeled a Council leadership surrogate group.
In his column Costikyan states, "Max reported back that he had examined non-partisan mayoral elections in cities of sufficient size to be comparable to New York City and concluded that . . . even with the elimination of the party label [some cities have non-partisan elections with party labels] from the ballot, everyone knew the political parties of the candidates, and the political parties continued to play their roles in the election."
Ed Costikyan has removed two of the major objections of non-partisan elections in New York City. First off we have indeed been studying it for more that four decades and it has existed in most other cities for far longer than that. Secondly adopting non-partisan elections is not a plot to eliminate political parties. Ask Mayor Daily of Chicago if his city's mayors or the local Democratic Party has had any trouble wielding partisan political clout in city, state and national politics.
From a close look at elections it is also obvious that African-American candidates have faired well in non-partisan municipal elections. Blacks have also been elected mayor in Los Angeles (Tom Bradley), Detroit (Dennis Archer), Houston (Lee Brown), San Francisco (Willie Brown), Dallas (Ron Kirk) and Atlanta (Andrew Young), as well as many small cities, like Newark and Paterson, New Jersey, with non-partisan elections.
Herman Badillo, a member of the new Charter Revision Commission, can rest easy; there is no chance that the Justice Department will find that non-partisan elections would violate the Voting Rights Act because it may disenfranchise minority voters.
Costikyan goes on, "According to Max, so-called non-partisan elections for mayor were at best a deceptive device if this were to be done on the premise that removing the party label from the ballot took the party out of the election process."
Well, Duh! The point of non-partisan election for City Council, borough-wide and citywide candidates is not to eliminate references to ideology, public policy or political associations -- including political parties. It is designed to allow all registered voters to vote in the election.
The Democratic Party dominated big city elections and in many other localities the Republican Party is equally entrenched. More often than not the general elections for city office were, as a result, non-existent or nominal at best because one party or the other was so dominant. This meant party primaries or, even worse, party executive committees dominated the selection of municipal governments.
As a result voters often enrolled in a political party because that party's primary was where all the action was in local elections. Their choice of party did not reflect their own political allegiance. In elections for state and national office where there is genuine competition in the general election, these voters become ticket splitters or voters for the opposition slate. Voters who chose to enroll in the party that reflected their view or no party at all were frozen out of a real election for city offices.
Wisely the local leaders in most big cities and indeed in more than 1,300 cities moved to non-partisan elections. Not to subvert political parties, not to disenfranchise minorities, but to allow all the voters to vote in a meaningful local election.
Will New York's leaders step up to reform? Can Democrats move to include others voters in city elections? More later.
