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.

On October 30, three New York counties, and many town governments, and the New York Republican Party, filed a federal lawsuit over the 2023 law change that moved local elections from odd yera to even years. Mew York Republican State Committee v Hochul, e.d., 2:25cv-6073. Here is the Complaint. It argues that the law violates the First Amendment, because under the new law, the voices of candidates for local office will be drowned out by all the hoopla over the federal and state election campaigns going on simultaneously.

The case is assigned to a Magistrate Judge. Presidents don’t appoint magistrates; they are chosen by the judges.