Elon Musk Properly Points Out Unfairness in New York Ballot Format

Posted on by November 6, 2025

On November 4, Elon Musk posted a message that criticized the New York City Mayoral Ballot being used that day. He hadn’t previously seemed to know about fusion, which New York permits. He felt it was unfair that Zohran Mamdani was on the ballot twice, once as the Democratic nominee and once as the Working Families nominee.

But he also criticized the ballot because independent candidate Andrew Cuomo was listed in the bottom line, apart from the nominees of the four qualified parties. Musk was quite right to note that the ballot format is unfair.

Unfortunately, reaction to Musk concentrated on his apparent ignorance about fusion voting, and ignored Musk’s valid point about the ballot format. New York is one of only five states that uses party-column or party-row ballots. Every other state uses office-group ballots, in which all the candidates for a particular office are grouped together. Each office has a separate part of the ballot. So an office-group lets voters focus on all the candidates for one particular race, without being distracted by candidates for another office.

Furthermore, among the 45 states with office-group ballots, one-third of them give an equal opportunity for any candidate to be listed first.

See this story, one of many that talks about the Musk message, and yet virtually ignores what he said about ballot format.

Comments

Elon Musk Properly Points Out Unfairness in New York Ballot Format — 16 Comments

  5. Don’t list any candidates. Office grouped write-in only ballot with secret ballot receipts for the voter to verify their own ballot was processed without alteration. I call this open ballot the Liberty Ballot, a content neutral ballot. It restores the rights voters had before the state monopolization of ballot printing in the 19th century while preserving voter anonymity. It would abolish incumbent censorship of voter choice and moot sore loser laws.

  12. If Trump was a tyrant the AZ SPAMBOT would have already been deprogrammed and memoryholed.

  16. So the balloit paper cost Cuomo some votes. Possibly – but rather less than Musk’s endorsement cost him

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