Bringing Out the Vote
October 5th, 2009
With only about 7 percent of those eligible casting votes in last Tuesday’s runoff for comptroller and City Council, some politicians are looking for an alternative.
Sen. Joseph Addabbo has recommended a ban on runoffs all together. The person who got the most votes in the initial primary would win the election. Calculating that the Sept. 29 runoff cost about something like $72 per vote cast, Addabbo said, “I plan to research the process by which run-off elections can be eliminated entirely.”
“The economics of it doesn’t make sense,” Sen. Bill Perkins, who also supports ending the runoffs, told the Daily News, “especially as we are struggling in this economy.”
Runoffs, as DeNora Getachew of Citizen Union Foundation recently explained on the Wonkster, are a relatively new feature on the city’s political landscape. For years, whoever won the primary, regardless of by how narrow a margin, got the party nomination. But in 1969, Getachew wrote, “A candidate who was considered outside of the mainstream won the Democratic primary with only 33 percent of the vote.” The city changed its election law to require a runoff in the primary for citywide office if no candidate received at least 40 percent of the vote.”
The city does not have runoffs in City Council elections. But that has its pitfalls too as can be seen in the recent primary results from the 28th City Council District in Queens. There the incumbent Thomas White, managed to hold on to his seat event though he received less than a third of the votes in the primary — and edged out his nearest rival by six hundredths of a percent.
Seeing flaws in runoffs and in not having runoff, experts have proposed other ideas.
In Gotham Gazette this week, Richard Flanagan of the College of Staten Island discusses nonpartisan elections, an idea the mayor has backed and which gets renewed support in Francis Barry’s recent book, The Scandal of Reform. This would open elections — including primaries — to all registered voters, not simply members of a particular political party. It has particular appeal in a place like New York where one party — in our case, the Democrats — hold such an edge in support that the general election often is little more than a formality.
Nonpartisan elections could still be won by the narrowest of margins (remember Bush v. Gore and Coleman v. Franken), but their supporters say that at least the total pool of voters would be far larger. “The best case for the adoption of nonpartisan elections is the principled one,” Flanagan wrote. “Nonpartisan elections give more people the opportunity to exercise, in a meaningful way, the most fundamental right and obligation in a democracy, the vote.”
Other, as Getachew wrote, propose instant runoffs, a method the Motion Picture Academy will use to award the Academy Award for Best Picture in 2010. Under this system, voters go to the polls once and rank their candidates in order of preference. If no candidate emerged with, say, 40 percent of the vote, the system would stage conduct a series of simulated runoffs, matching up the leading candidates and using the voter preferences to determine their vote totals.
By Gail Robinson on October 5, 2009, 2:41 pmIn category: Albany, Electoral Politics, Gotham City, Governing | No Comments »



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