Dan Squadron vs. voters

Another elected official has just retired on his own sweet timetable, handing his seat not to the voters, but to party bosses. Why is it so hard getting people who are in the business of representing constituents to respect their rights? Last month we rapped Councilman David Greenfield for leaving office to take a new job after claiming a spot on the reelection ballot — putting sole power to pick a successor in his own hands.

State Sen. Daniel Squadron just made a similar move that will arrogantly deprive some 300,000 people in his Brooklyn and Manhattan district of a chance to decide who serves them. And deprive who knows how many would-be public servants of the chance to make their case to the voters.

In a Daily News Op-Ed Wednesday, Squadron announced he is stepping down from the Senate in the middle of his fifth two-year term to join what sounds like a noble nonprofit aiming to get better candidates elected to statehouses nationwide.

Which makes it especially rich that there will be no election to select his successor. Had Squadron announced his retirement in July, wannabe replacements would have had time to do the small-d democratic thing, circulating petitions to get on the September primary ballot in the overwhelmingly Democratic district.

There’d be debate. Competition. An actual election.

Because Squadron waited until the last minute, that whole process will be outsourced to local party activists, and ultimately to party bosses. Whomever they anoint gets on the November ballot. The Democrat will win, serving the district for at least one year, and probably long after that, given the superpower of incumbency.

Squadron, who admits this is a lousy process, says he just wasn’t focused on the deadline — but that, given the way conversations to launch the new project unfolded, he couldn’t have met the deadline regardless.

It’s cold comfort. Squadron made his name as a reformer. He fought to close a corrosive loophole letting unlimited corporate cash flow into elections. To overhaul the state’s arcane voting systems to increase participation. He even sponsored a bill that would’ve made special elections nonpartisan, to limit party bosses’ control.

“Nothing in his life became him like the leaving it,” says one of Shakespeare’s characters about another in “Macbeth”; it means the man’s final hours reflected best on his character. Many things in Squadron’s Senate career became him better than the leaving it.