Cara Brown McCormick
NEW Y ORK CITY — Unite NY submitted more than 45,000 signatures to the New York City Clerk's office on July 2, seeking to put a question on the ballot to let voters decide whether to open the city's closed primary system and use ranked-choice voting for its municipal elections.
Under current law, more than 1.1 million New York City registered voters are unaffiliated and are barred from voting in primaries.
New York is a total outlier among major cities: Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, and Boston all hold some form of nonpartisan municipal elections.
Unite NY’s petition is unique in some important ways. The new law, if passed, would create a June primary election open to all registered voters, similar to the nonpartisan primaries in California, Washington, and Alaska. In the primary, voters can rank up to five candidates, and the Top 3 finishers advance to the general election in November.
The petition route taken by Unite NY allowed its organizers to bypass the city's Charter Revision Commission process, which typically originates ballot questions on election rules.
It’s a good thing, because right now that whole process is mired in a morass.
A lawsuit was filed this week by members of a so-called “zombie” commission that former Mayor Eric Adams created on his last day in office. That commission had as its first order of business establishing an open primary, but the administration of current New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani shut it down.
Mayor Mamdani urged the state legislature to draft and pass a new provision in the state budget allowing him to disband the Adams commission.
Whether the Unite NY petition question reaches this year's ballot depends on timing under state municipal law and on a separate commission Mayor Mamdani has since formed, which is expected to draft its own ballot questions for voters.
Sahalie Donaldson
Citizens Union has this excellent explainer on the charter revision process in NYC. On July 3, the organization announced its support for the open primary referendum.
“Citizens Union has supported open primaries for decades because it delivers on our good government mission to advance fair and open elections,” said John Avlon, the Chairman of Citizens Union of New York.
“Right now, 1.1 million New Yorkers – disproportionately under the age of 40 and in communities of color – are effectively disenfranchised from the elections that matter most. We need a new era of reform in New York to refocus our elections back to all the people, not the parties. That’s the essence of ‘one person, one vote.’" - John Avlon
A 2025 Charter Revision Commission report found that open primaries drew more public testimony than any other single topic it considered. Nevertheless, that particular commission declined to put open primary reform on the ballot when it had the chance.
“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 at the time.
Mayor Mamdani has not signaled his support or opposition to the open primaries measure. Talk of open primaries dominated the mayor's first Charter Revision Commission meetings in June.