In January 2016, bills were introduced in each house of the New York legislature to ease the deadline for voters to switch parties. Currently law requires a voter who switches parties to do so in October of the previous year. SB 2740 and AB 5763 would change that to 90 days before the primary. The authors are Senator Liz Krueger and Assemblymember Brian Kavanagh.
Neither bill has advanced, but there is so much attention now being paid to this issue, because of the April 19 presidential primaries, that this year perhaps the bills will make some headway. Assemblymember Kavanagh has been introducing this bill in every session starting in 2009, and it has never before advanced. Thanks to Mike Drucker for this news.
New York should eliminate partisan registration and adopt Top 2.
The system in NYS is crooked and always has been.The entire State is run by NYC and our votes here in upstate NY have no bearing on elections.It is actually a waste of time to vote in this state unless you are a Liberal Democrat living in NYC.
National elections aren’t much better in this part of the State because again our votes are negated by NYC.
The primary system is another joke because you have to be registered in a party for almost a year to vote in the primary and the parties have the system locked up.These lawsuits will help this issue if they ever make it to court but I have my doubts because both parties like it the way it is.
Are there any court decisions on the constitutionality of early deadlines for changing party registration? And, from a constitutional point of view, isn’t there an analogy to early deadlines for ballot access of candidates?
The US Supreme Court upheld the New York law in 1973 in Rosario v Rockefeller, by a vote of 5-4.
The analogy to early deadlines for candidates to file for the general election is not a good one. Early petition deadlines for independent candidates to get on the ballot are not rooted in the nation’s history. In 1892, the first presidential election in which there were government-printed ballots, the median deadline for petitions to get on the general election ballot was in October. The median continued to be in October for 1896, 1900, 1904, 1908, 1912, 1916, 1920, 1924, and 1928.
Then states started making the deadlines earlier, but even in 1932 thru 1956, the median deadline was in September. Nowadays it is August.
By contrast, early deadlines for voters to register into a party, in order to vote in that party’s primary, were traditionally much more severe than they are today. For instance, in California, people can switch only two weeks before a primary, but in 1972 and earlier, voters couldn’t switch parties within 53 days before a primary.
Living in New York, I can tell you that the publicity this year surrounding our current system won’t make a bit of difference. After the primary is over, things will quiet down and the status quo will prevail. That’s just the way the two major parties in the State want it. If there is one thing in the State that I wish could change, it would be fusion voting. It’s only produced demagogues forming their own third parties in order to court the favor of the candidates of the two main parties. Right now, only the Green Party is a true ballot qualified third party in the State. The Libertarians could have been another but in the last election that could have ballot qualified them, the powers that be buried the name of their governor candidate so far down on the paper ballot that it was very difficult to find. In fact, it was in another column, which prevented them from getting the necessary 50,000 votes.
Steve: More people than ever in NY are aware of this deadline and determined to change it. Lots of activists will be turning their attention to this after the election. Google ‘make ny an open primary’, including the Moveon petition by that name, and join in on any efforts you’d like, if you want to help change this.
Fusion has its benefits. It has produced three decent New York City mayors since LaGuardia’s day.
Richard writes, “The analogy to early deadlines for candidates to file for the general election is not a good one” and goes on to show that the histories are very different. I didn’t write, “from a historical point of view”. I wrote, “from a constitutional point of view”. One of the problems with early deadlines is that candidates can change their minds about whether to run at all depending on events that occur after the deadline. Similarly, voters can change their minds about their party affiliations depending on events that can occur at any time. It’s not clear to me how the disparity in the historical treatment of the two subjects determines the constitutionality, or lack of it, of any particular rule.