Building a better government

It’s nice to have some good news for a change: Thanks to state Sen. Zellnor Myrie and the Democrats now firmly in control of Albany, early voting has finally arrived starting this weekend and running straight through next Sunday.

This being New York City and the Board of Elections being the joke that it is, the implementation is…questionable, so be sure to check vote.nyc to confirm your voting site, which will likely be different before Election Day than on it, and the hours for early voting.

There’s just one citywide race on the ballot, for public advocate. Spoiler: Democratic incumbent Jumaane Williams will walk away with the position created in the 1990s after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the old Board of Estimate here was unconstitutional and the City Charter was changed to eliminate the powerful position of City Council president, then held by Andy Stein.

The new office was intended as a political pity prize for Stein, who didn’t end up winning it and these days writes trollish Democrats-for-Trump takes. The charter changes ushered in what will be three decades of strong mayors beginning with Rudy Giuliani (David Dinkins didn’t seem to entirely grasp the new powers at his disposal), who reshaped the city for better and worse along with public advocates who’ve mostly used the weak office as a springboard to run for stronger ones.

I bring up that old history because you’ll also see on your ballot several proposed changes to the City Charter. Your vote matters a lot here, given how few people are expected to cast them in this off-year. Regrettably, each of the five proposals squeezes in a few different ideas, forcing you to vote yes or no on the bundle.

Here’s my advice on how to vote on the two most significant ones:

Vote yes on proposal one, which would introduce ranked-choice voting in primary and special elections, eliminating the need for runoffs while encouraging candidates to campaign more widely.

And vote yes on proposal two, which would give the Civilian Complaint Review Board new investigative powers, and require the police commissioner to explain in writing when — as commissioners have usually done — he chooses not to abide by the CCRB’s recommendations for officer discipline. The police unions, who have been in a continuous war with the outside review board, are pushing hard to turn out “no” votes.

Meantime in Albany, power remains very far from the people.

Long story short, after the Legislature and Gov. Cuomo couldn’t reach a deal in the budget for a plan to reform the state’s campaign corruption system, which allows people to spend basically unlimited money to rent politicians, they created a Public Campaign Finance Commission, whose recommendations will become law next year unless the Legislature acts.

Not incidentally, that’s the same bogus setup legislators used to get themselves a pay raise without having to vote for it. (They then had the chutzpah to successfully piggyback an outside suit that got the courts to strike down the limitations on outside income that were supposed to come with those fat pay hikes.)

The trouble with the campaign finance plan came when Cuomo slipped a clause into the budget that also lets the Commission consider fusion voting, in which candidates can run on multiple ballot lines, and appointed to the commission a longtime opponent of third parties who happens also to be the head of the state Democratic Party.

The backstory here is Cuomo’s hardly disguised hatred for the Working Families Party, which supported primary challengers to the governor in his last two runs and which bases its power on pushing Democrats further to the left and is a rising power in Albany with Democrats firmly in control there now.

So the governor is using a campaign finance plan — long a priority of the WFP — as his presumptive instrument to kill it, and daring lawmakers to stop him.

Something to remember the next time their names are on the ballot.

harrysiegel@gmail.com