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An Election Day Ballot Trap
NY Times - The City | Long Island | Westchester |
By now, most New Yorkers have already figured out how they will vote in the race for governor. Here is one last-minute plea. If you want Eliot Spitzer, vote for him on the Democratic line. If John Faso is your choice, remember that he’s a Republican.
Both Mr. Spitzer and Mr. Faso have been cross-endorsed by other parties. Mr. Faso appears on the Conservative Party line, and Mr. Spitzer is also the candidate of the Independence and Working Families Parties. This is part of a strange shell game that is unique to New York politics. Rather than field their own candidates, third parties can simply latch onto somebody else’s nominee.
Any party whose candidate for governor gets 50,000 votes automatically qualifies to run candidates in every single race for the next four years. That’s a perfectly reasonable law — but in New York there is no requirement that the candidate in question must actually belong to the party in question. The same nominee can appear on the ballot two, three, four or more times.
The best way to understand the system is to follow the fortunes of the now-defunct Liberal Party. For decades, the Liberals almost invariably followed the same formula for success. 1) Cross-endorse the Democratic candidate for governor, thus earning at least 50,000 spillover votes from New Yorkers who liked to think of themselves as very liberal indeed. 2) Spend the next four years cross-endorsing other candidates for everything from United States senator to City Council member. 3) Collect payments from grateful officeholders in the form of patronage jobs and campaign contributions.
In its earliest incarnation, the Liberal Party actually did care about issues and expected the candidates it cross-endorsed to support the principles for which it stood. But as time went on, its leaders showed less and less concern for anything but the big payoff at the end of the election cycle.
The game began to collapse after 1993, when Raymond Harding, the party’s longtime chief, delivered its mayoral endorsement to Rudolph Giuliani, who wanted to give New York City Democrats a place to vote for him other than the hated Republican line. For that support, Mr. Harding got not one but two sons appointed to high positions in the Giuliani administration. One of them, who became president of the Housing Development Corporation on the basis of no qualifications whatsoever, wound up being sent to prison for embezzling more than $400,000 and for possession of child pornography.
The parties plowing the same field now claim that unlike the Liberals, they stand for something. The Working Families Party, which has had a great deal of success in recent years, says it exists to pressure Democrats (and an occasional rogue Republican) into supporting progressive principles. But there are lots of ways to push for change in Albany or in local government that are not such blatant invitations to abuse. The cross-endorsement system is basically a permission slip to sell lines on the New York ballot to the highest bidders.
At its best, the system rewards parties with little or no accountability outside of a small group of organizers with a disproportionate amount of power. Their key to electoral success does not lie in developing candidates who can appeal to the voters. It lies in picking a really good name. (Who could be against independence? Or working families?) After that, all that is necessary is to cross-endorse Republicans or Democrats who are hungry for extra positions on the ballot — or afraid that the third-party line could be handed over to a genuine candidate who might siphon away needed votes.
If you want to vote for a real third-party candidate, the ballot is going to be full of them. The Libertarian, Green and Socialist Workers Parties all have their own nominees for governor. Qualifying through petition signatures is easy enough that even the Rent Is Too High party made the cut. But if you want to vote for Eliot Spitzer or John Faso, stick to the parties they really belong to.
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 *Website by David Doonan, Labor Donated to Hawkins for Senate Campaign* |
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