Suggestions to NYC Charter Revision Commission
Commissioners:
I appreciate the diligence and seriousness with which you’ve undertaken your duties in studying the city charter. Having watched and/or attended all your Commission’s meetings and/or hearings, I’ve been impressed not only at the wide range of proposals coming from the public, but the incredibly informed and attentive questions you’ve asked both members of the public and experts at the hearings. I’m writing to you now, before the proposals are finalized and the preliminary staff report is released, in the hopes of pushing the Commission toward adoption of one of the proposals you’ve been considering, urge you to reconsider one proposal that so far seems to have limited support among the Commissioners and urge you to consider two more areas of study that were largely absent from all of the “expert” hearings. I’ve testified multiple times, both in writing and verbally and I’m not going to reiterate what I’ve brought up, but there are four areas that you have just an incredible opportunity to improve the electoral system, the politics, and by extension, the governance of our city.
I. Ranked Choice Voting
I’ve been heartened by the prospect of this being put on the ballot this year. If you’re able to put this on the ballot, it will have the greatest impact on reforming politics in our city than any ballot measure since term limits was passed in 1993. Lest anyone is considering not putting this on the ballot, I wanted to point to a few of the areas where I think this would be incredibly beneficial for NYC voters.
A. Elimination of the “spoiler” effect
Those of us who’ve worked in minor party politics or worked on the campaigns of third-party candidates are so accustomed to hearing the “wasted vote” argument. The conventional wisdom states that voters should avoid voting for the candidate of their choice (or that best represents their values) because that candidate might not win, thereby causing the worst possible choice to be elected. I’m sure Jill Stein, Gary Johnson, Ralph Nader and Ross Perot can hear questions about this in their sleep. Irrespective of the merits of this argument, think of the collective amount of time, energy and effort that has been spent by the news media, political scientists, candidates, campaign strategists and pollsters instead of areas related to policy. What a waste!
Additionally, if the “spoiler” effect does have merit, why would we want to have an electoral system that either causes voters to vote for mediocre candidates or have candidates elected who aren’t really representatives of the voters? What kind of system is that? Additionally, if voters are accustomed to voting for the best of the worst candidates, what incentive would major party candidates and/or establishment candidates within the Democratic Party have to be more responsive to the voters’ needs? If you vote for the best of the worst every four years these candidates will get worse. Ranked choice voting eliminates that.
B. Saving the costs of runoff elections
Currently, we have runoff elections in primary elections if no candidate garners 40 percent of the vote. We spent about $13 million in taxpayer money for a runoff between two candidates running for Public Advocate in 2013. This was the only thing on the ballot. This is absolutely insane. Could you think of a better use for that $13 million? I know I could. When I helped orchestrate several Reform Party congressional primaries in 2016, I was referred to by the editorial board of a NYC newspaper as a clown with a talent for wasting taxpayer money. Aside from the fact that it was out of our party’s control which other parties chose to have primaries that day, the cost of these Congressional primaries paled in comparison to the cost of opening every polling place in this city for a super low turnout election for an office with virtually no power. What’s the point? By replacing runoff elections with “instant runoff” voting, we could save 100 percent of the cost. This is a common-sense reform, which provides all the benefits of runoff voting without the added expense of a second round of public matching funds and opening every polling place in the city.
C. Providing the winner with a greater mandate
As it stands now, it’s not unusual for candidates to get elected with a plurality of the vote in a multi-field election. For instance, in the recent special election for Public Advocate, the candidate who got elected, did so with nearly seven of 10 New Yorkers voting against him. What does it say about a NYC official that’s opposed by 70 percent of the electorate? It says that he’s the by-product of a broken system. By mandating that whoever gets elected is preferred by a majority of New Yorkers, elected officials will have a true mandate and the wishes of voters will actually be realized. Elections are supposed to select officials, who are representative of the will of the voters, not candidates that slip in through a combination of good luck and exploitation of electoral loopholes.
D. Incentive for candidates to reach out to more voters
Right now, our elections are largely one-party affairs. This means that in almost every district in the city, the primary election is the only consequential contest. This causes candidates to appeal to the most extreme elements of their parties. Political scientists and academics have written for years that voters who vote in primary elections aren’t necessarily representative even of rank-and-file party members. This is incentivizing candidates only to reach out to the most extreme elements of their parties (only enough needed to win a plurality) and thereby produces elected officials that are far more radical than the electorate they represent. A ranked-choice voting system, would incentivize candidates to reach out to ALL VOTERS. This is precisely the sort of thing that makes an electoral system democratic. I can see virtually no downside to this whatsoever.
II. Proportional Representation
This area represents my biggest disappointment with the Commission by far. I pointed out in my previous testimony that the 12 years where the New York City Council was elected by proportional representation (1936–47) was not only among the most diverse (both ethnically and politically) in our city’s history, but it was the one time in our city that the legislature was representative of how the people voted. This should be a model to aspire to, not a black mark in history that we pretend never existed. The only reason proportional representation was eliminated was due to the scare tactics of red-baiting politicians at the height of the Cold War. Why would we not consider bringing this back? Because this issue hasn’t been studied at length (in spite of my repeated urgings) by recent Commissions, I didn’t expect you to put it on the ballot this year, but I’m not only disappointed, but completely dumbfounded by your unwillingness to call even a single expert witness to talk about proportional representation — its positives, its drawbacks and how its implementation would work today. How can that be? You’re all so smart and represent such a diverse array of elected officials. How could you not insist that even one expert be called on this? To behave in such a manner, in spite of public testimony urging the exact opposite course of action to the one you took reinforces the negative perception on the part of many members of the public that this Commission is less of an independent Commission with a mandate to examine and evaluate the city charter as a whole, but more of a taskforce designed to do the bidding of longstanding New York politicians. I beg of you, please hold at least one expert meeting on proportional representation. I think you owe the public at least that much. It’s unfortunate that Henry Stern is no longer with us and can’t be called as a witness. He wrote a great deal about proportional representation, including in this column here http://www.junipercivic.com/juniperberryarticle.asp?nid=238#.XKdbgv1KiM8. To continue to ignore the desires of the voters, without even the illusion of a hearing would reinforce public cynicism about city government at a time when confidence in our policymakers at every level is already at an all-time low.
To read a bit more about proportional representation, I’d suggest this report from Fair Vote https://fairvote.app.box.com/v/PR-in-NYC.
If you’re interested in scholars who might be able to offer testimony about proportional representation’s potential implementation, I’d suggest the following:
1. Rob Richie, the president and CEO of FairVote, a non-profit organization that researches and advocates election reforms
2. Daniel O’ Prosterman, author of “Defining Democracy: Electoral Reform and the Struggle for Power in New York City “and an assistant professor of History at Salem College
3. Mitchell L. Moss, Henry Hart Rice professor of urban policy and planning, and director of the Rudin Center for Transportation at NYU
4. Francis Barry, former Bloomberg aide and author of “The Scandal of Reform”
5. Alec MacGillis who covers politics and government for ProPublica
6. Lee Drutman, a senior fellow in the political reform program at New America
III. Non-Partisan Elections
I know that only four of you voted in favor of moving forward with a non-partisan elections proposal. I’m hoping that at least another four of you will reconsider. There are really two crucial aspects to non-partisan elections, which I hope you’ll give some weight to.
The first has to do with why party registration should be the only thing that voters get to learn about a candidate on the ballot. Think about that. The only cognitive shortcut or indicia of a candidate’s fitness for office that voters learn about in the voting booth is their party registration. How can this be? We don’t include anything about their education, their credit score, their previous governmental experience, their neighborhood of origin, their legislative priorities or what groups are supporting them. To display party registration (and only party registration) on the ballot, contributes to a level of tribalism that only serves to divide the electorate further and produce elected officials, who are more interested in ideological warfare than the nuts and bolts issues involved in running a municipality. There’s a reason that hundreds of cities around the country all utilize non-partisan elections.
The argument that there’s an ideological indicator that comes with your political party is completely fallacious. Both Dov Hikind and Charles Barron are Brooklyn Democrats and would appear on the ballot that way. I don’t think you could have two candidates who have a more different view of politics and world affairs. What good does it do the voter to have each of them carry the same party label? The same can be said of Ruben Diaz, Sr. and Ritchie Torres. What purpose are these party labels really serving except to exclude voters, thereby ensuring that our elected officials are selected by the fewest possible people, which leads to the second aspect of why non-partisan municipal elections are so important.
Even if you completely disregard everything I just alluded to about the value of party labels on the ballot, you can’t ignore the fact that the hundreds of thousands of voters who have chosen not to enroll in a political party are treated like second-class citizens. Not only do these independent voters essentially forego any realistic hope of ever being elected, but they lack any meaningful voice in selecting NYC’s leaders. This type of political bigotry needs to end. If you deem party labels so essential that they must be enshrined in our city’s charter, then at the very least, I hope you’ll consider the suggestion of Esther Fuchs to allow these voters to vote in primary elections.
It should be noted that New York City already has non-partisan elections (sometimes). Whenever there’s a special election, there’s a non-partisan election. Are the candidates who win these elections (including Gifford Miller, Christine Quinn and Jumaane Williams) somehow less fit than their counterparts elected in partisan contests? Of course not. Why not make the system uniform and give all voters a voice and a choice? If you don’t, then at the very least, I think you owe the unaffiliated voters of the city an explanation why you think they should continue to be treated as political nonentities, even though they’re paying taxes to administer these primary elections and paying the electric bill for every room in which you’ve had a public hearing.
IV. Lower the partisan signature requirement to 2.5% or replace petitions with filing fees
When the 2010 Charter Revision Commission cut the raw number of signatures needed to qualify for the ballot in half, that was a great thing that really served to enable many candidates to run for office. However, I cautioned at the time that to fail to reduce the 5 percent (signature) requirement to get on the ballot, would have a deleterious effect on the minor parties. Unfortunately, everything that I’ve warned about has come to pass and it’s become even more difficult to run for office as a minor party candidate, as opposed to an independent or major party candidate. While it now takes only a fraction of a percentage of eligible voters to qualify for the ballot as a Democrat, it remains 5 percent for an Independence Party candidate. It’s seem the height of inequity to force minor party candidates (who almost always have fewer resources than their major party counterparts) to collect more signatures. I’m hoping you’ll consider reducing the signature requirement to 2.5 percent, or better yet, replacing signatures entirely with filing fees. Below, I’ve reproduced my prior testimony on the subjects of a lower petition percentage (from 2010) and a filing fee (last September).
The troubling part of your proposal is that it only cuts in half the raw number needed to run for office (e.g. City Council goes from 900 to 450, Borough President goes from 4,000 to 2,000 and the citywide offices 7,500 to 3,750) but does nothing to reduce the percentage requirement. Five percent still remains. The reason this is significant is that candidates running on a minor party line, still need to get the 5 percent, whereas if your language passes, major party candidates would always need to get less than 1 percent to get on the ballot. The minor party signatures (currently Independence, Conservative and Working Families) are far more difficult to get because you have to work off of a list, you can’t stand on a street corner like you could in many parts of the city to get Democratic signatures. So even though the minor party signatures are tougher to get, we’re going to make it far more difficult to meet a candidate’s petition threshold? To me, that doesn’t make any sense. It’s already so difficult to run for office as a third party candidate, why give the major party candidates another advantage?
Here’s what running for office in NYC would look like if your proposal passes:
OFFICE: % required currently % required under proposal
Mayor, PA, Comptroller
Democrat .003% .0014%
Republican .017% .009%
Independence 5% 4%
Conservative 5% 5%
Working Families 5% 5%
Borough President
(Manhattan)
Democrat .065% .0035%
Republican 4% 2%
Independence 5% 5%
Conservative 5% 5%
Working Families 5% 5%
City Council
(51st District — SI)
Democrat 3% 1.3%
Republican 2.75% 1.25%
Independence 5% 5%
Conservative 5% 5%
Working Families 5% 5%
This pattern continues in a similar manner in every district in the city. The smaller the party, the more discriminatory this burden is. If the goal is to ease ballot access, why not make it easier for everybody? It seems incredibly undemocratic to say, we’re only going to ease ballot access for the two major parties. Let’s ease it for the minor parties too by making their threshold 2.5 percent.
Therefore, I would suggest that the following language be added at the end of each subsection in the proposed 1057-b “or 2.5 percent of the enrollment of a party for designating petitions.”
The other danger is that by significantly reducing the number required for independent nominating petitions (my understanding is that if the proposed language passes it would reduce it from 2,700 to 450 for City Council) is that because it would be so easy to create an independent line, you’d see scores of major party candidates seeking to create names that sound good in an effort to deceive the voters. For instance, for only 450 signatures, a Republican running in a Democratic district could also be the candidate of the Liberal Party, the Progressive Party, the Labor Party or the Leftist Party. If the ballot access minor parties are further marginalized by this proposal, it diminishes their ability to offer true partisan or ideological cognitive shortcuts to the voters.
Please do the right thing. It’s only fair. The minor parties would STILL have to meet a higher threshold than the major parties even though they have far fewer resources. My proposal would merely level the playing field a bit.
… While there are specific requirements for how to get on the ballot in New York City that are government by state law, the Charter Commission that Commissioner Fiala served on in 2010 cut by half the raw number of signatures needed to qualify for the ballot for every municipal office- something which has not only never been challenged in court, but helped pave the way for everyday New Yorkers who have sought to run for office, particularly without the backing of party machines or robust political operations, however you can go further.
Even with a lower petition requirement, our current process of qualifying candidates for the ballot is hopelessly flawed. In addition to being inefficient, wasteful, imprecise, frustrating and having no connection whatsoever to how effective an elected official will actually be once they’re in office, the petitioning process coupled with the city’s generous matching funds program, which now appears poised to soon jump to a generous 8–1 match has created a cottage industry of consultants, attorneys, political operatives and hired guns, who know how to game the system. In addition to being anachronistic, the petition process is needlessly costly. It’s an administrative nightmare, a horrendous waste of paper and a tremendous drain on the staff of the Board of Elections, who inevitably put in for a great deal of overtime come petition time. I would urge the Commission to put an end to this madness. I’m hoping the Commission will place a question on the ballot next year allowing an alternative to the existing petition process, whereby candidates would be able to qualify the ballot by paying a filing fee equivalent to one percent of the salary of the public office you’re seeking. Not only would this save candidates and their volunteers countless hours toiling away in futility, but it would put the city in a position to actually make some money from those seeking to run for office. While the city is running a surplus now, we’ve seen history show that the good times never last forever. When there’s an economic downturn, this new revenue stream could allow the Board of Elections to have a dedicated funding stream without the City Council being forced to consider property tax increases, which take the worst toll on those who can least afford it.
Lest anyone think that this simply allows a shortcut for the wealthy to run for any office, you could keep the petition process in place and allow candidates to have a choice whether they want to circulate petitions or pay the filing fee. This hybrid approach has worked well in states like Florida, where almost all candidates choose to pay the filing fee. Additionally, while 1% of a $148,000 salary may seem onerous, when you compare that to the costs that campaign often incur to hire attorneys, consultants and petition gatherers, it’s almost always the less costly option. Imagine what elections in our city would look like if candidates spent their campaigns persuading voters that they had the best ideas for the city’s future or convincing them that their background and life experience is best suited for the job they’re seeking, instead of making sure they printed in the right place, initialed next to an error on the address line or signed next to the X.
Please don’t hesitate to contact me if you have any questions or would like to discuss this further.
Sincerely,
Frank Morano
816–8-MORANO
P.S. If you’re interested in reading all of my previous testimony before your commission, you can do so here https://medium.com/@frankmorano/charter-revision-commission-testimony-from-frank-morano-6615844d700d?fbclid=IwAR0C3oyya4ra82B4WfaZ3yTJKKbosYIMy0Ia9Jo32XIFO-9lkdNqfUKErU8 you can also watch it here https://www.facebook.com/notes/frank-morano/my-testimony-to-the-charter-revision-commission/10156910921148699/
