New York voter beware
The Working Families Party is seeing one of a political organization’s deepest fears being realized in Rensselaer County: a hostile takeover by another party.
It’s the latest assault on third parties, this time from the Republican side. This political intrigue is all the more reason that New York should end its practice of allowing third parties to cross-endorse candidates.
As the Times Union’s Kenneth Crowe II reports, Rensselaer County Republicans — on the opposite end of the political spectrum from the liberal Working Families Party — are accomplishing this infiltration by getting GOP supporters in the Independence Party to shift their enrollment to the WFP. With sufficient numbers, they’d be able to ensure that local Republican candidates also win the Working Families ballot line, potentially drawing votes from WFP loyalists who vote the ballot line without researching the candidates.
The attempted mischief stems from an attack that the Democratic Party, at the urging of Gov. Andrew Cuomo, has waged on third parties on another front. Mr. Cuomo and the Legislature,
now run entirely by Democrats, changed the rules under which parties secure automatic ballot lines. Where they used to have to get 50,000 votes in the gubernatorial race every four years, they now have to get 130,000 votes, or 2 percent of votes cast, in presidential and gubernatorial elections — that is, every two years. Without an automatic ballot line, they have to circulate petitions to get their candidates onto ballots, and the thresholds for that, too, have gone up.
The November election knocked the Independence, Green, and Libertarian parties off the ballot, because they didn’t reach the new higher threshold. Left on the ballot are the Democratic, Republican, Conservative and Working Families parties.
The Independence party has typically been controlled by Republicans. With no automatic Independence line anymore, Rensselaer County Republicans, who can count on Conservative endorsements, have their sights on the WFP, which typically endorses Democrats.
We’ve long argued that allowing candidates to have multiple ballot lines invites corruption. There are counterarguments: The WFP, for example, says its endorsement enables it to push Democratic candidates to take more progressive positions. But cross-endorsements aren’t always so philosophically based. Over the decades in New York, some third parties have used the promise of an extra ballot line to secure patronage jobs — making their endorsements just sleazy political bribes.
Ending cross-endorsements would also discourage hostile takeovers like the one playing out in Rensselaer County. And that would be for the better. Parties should put up their own candidates who stand for what the parties believe in. Elections should be contests of ideas, not just numbers. And nobody should campaign under a deceptive banner.
Until the state Legislature fixes this, it’s up to voters to look beyond ballot lines at what candidates really stand for. So for now, caveat suffragator — voter beware — goes double in Rensselaer County.