Legal Commentary

Yesterday, New York City held the only election that really matters for the only two city-wide offices that were genuinely up for grabs -- the comptroller and the public advocate. (I am assuming that Bloomberg will face little danger from his under-funded and mostly unknown Democratic opponent in the general election). As a practical matter, virtually no one showed up to vote, because the election was a Democratic primary runoff for offices that few city residents understand and for candidates that, because they were all Democrats, could not be distinguished on the basis of party labels. (Of course, one could rely on campaign literature to learn about the candidates. Guess what? All of them said that they were going to stand up against special interests). 227,000 people voted in the run-off, meaning that the second-most important officers of a jurisdiction that governs over seven million people were chosen by, say, 2% of the population.

It is not that these officials do not matter. The Comptroller, for instance, has a significant role to play in managing the city's pension funds and reviewing city contracts. In an era when the city's collective bargaining agreements may come close to bankrupting the city, one would hope that the voters knew something about the candidates' stand on, say, "20 years and out" retirement packages. This is not to say that they should share my conservative skepticism about the sustainability of such deals: They simply ought to be aware of what is actually at stake in the vote. But the low turnout and desultory sources of information suggest that the tiny number of voters mostly voted blind, with the election turning on the informed self-interest of public employees. If one were especially well-informed, then one might know that John Liu, one of the two candidates for Comptroller, received the endorsements of the Working Families Party and the Central Labor Council, the latter by a vote of 22-0, meaning that Liu was the choice of the public employee unions. One could safely infer that his opponent, David Yassky, had as much chance of beating him as the Orioles had of winning a three-game series against the Yankees.

Predictably, Yassky lost. Whatever one thinks of this outcome (I supported Yassky), the process is preposterous. A tiny handful of voters vote blindly for two proper nouns that signify virtually nothing, and a much tinier handful of self-interested voters actually determine the outcome. But this is the process dictated by elections in a one-party town where the absence of competitive parties insures that voters will know nothing about the issues actually at stake in an election. David Schleicher has a good paper explaining how to reform this mess with rules encouraging competitive local political parties. But what are the odds that the power brokers in New York City would ever accept such reforms?