Albany Parties On

With all the minor parties New York has these days, it’s getting so crowded on the ballot voters are going to need a magnifying glass to read it.

Even worse, the explosion of new parties hasn’t meant more choices for voters. To the contrary, because our state allows for one party to crossendorse the candidate of another, party lines have become pirate ships of convenience — a big contributor to New York’s endemic political corruption.

One legislator is trying to do something about it. Assemblyman Gary Pretlow (D-Westchester) is introducing a bill he first proposed in 2010. It would double to 100,000 the gubernatorial election votes a minor party needs to qualify for a permanent line on the ballot.

Last November, fully six minor factions won automatic lines for the next four years. Two of them, the Women’s Equality Party and Stop Common Core, aren’t anything more than a letterhead. And only one minor party — the Green Party — ran its own candidates. The rest simply endorsed either the Democrat or the Republican.

Pretlow’s bill is a good first step. Had it been in effect last fall, three of the minor parties would have fallen short of the threshold and one, the Working Families Party, would only barely have qualified.

The real solution, of course, is an end to the crossendorsements that lead minor parties to sell themselves to the highest bidder. But it’s a testament to how corrupt things are in Albany that even Pretlow’s modest proposal isn’t likely to go anywhere. Because, the minor parties will no doubt threaten to withhold their ballot lines to bully legislators into rejecting it.