By Jeremy Gruber for the NY Daily News
There is a basic question New York’s progressive political establishment needs to answer: How can you claim to stand for voting rights while refusing to stand up for more than 600,000 New Yorkers of color who are excluded from New York City’s primary elections?
New York City has 1.2 million independent voters. That’s almost a quarter of all voters in our city. Fifty-four percent are people of color. Yet because they are independent, they cannot vote in primary elections.
For progressives, this should be an obvious problem to solve.
The movement has spent decades fighting barriers to voting: voter ID laws, voter purges and restrictive registration rules. It has fought for early voting, mail voting, same-day and automatic registration. The principle is simple: government should make it easier for eligible citizens to participate, not harder.
But many of those same voices are willing to defend shutting more than a million New Yorkers out of voting.
That matters because in New York City the primary is often the election that matters. In many districts that is where the outcome is really determined. Our general elections are broadly inclusive but often meaningless; our primary elections are often meaningful but highly exclusive.
That is by design.
Closed primaries offer an advantage to insiders that know how to operate within the existing system. Independent voters are harder to organize and take for granted. Opening the primary means candidates have to compete for a larger electorate.
This barrier isn’t being imposed by boogeymen Republicans, though insiders in states like Texas and Alabama are working to close their primaries. It is being defended here in New York by some of the same progressive politicians and organizations that have made voting rights a defining issue. Repeated polling may have found that New Yorkers want to let all voters vote, but insiders — whether they be Republicans in Texas or Democrats in New York — want to control who participates in the elections that determine their power.
This is hardly a new voting-rights question. A century ago, Texas used primaries to exclude Black voters. In Smith vs. Allwright, Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund successfully challenged that system. It established an important principle: when a taxpayer funded and government administered primary is part of the process for choosing public officials, it cannot simply be treated as a private affair of a political party.
Progressivism has traditionally meant challenging institutions that concentrate power and exclude people from meaningful participation. Yet when the people being excluded are independent New Yorkers, many of them Latino, Asian and African-American, many progressives suddenly sound like the political insiders they otherwise oppose.
There is no reason to fear independent voters. We are just regular New Yorkers, as idiosyncratic and diverse as our city. We simply don’t want to be forced to join a private political party in order to vote in our city’s public elections.
That’s why three-quarters of American cities already allow independents to vote in primaries, including Los Angeles, Seattle and Chicago. Washington did so this summer. Those cities haven’t stopped being Democratic. They have simply allowed more of their residents to participate.
So how can you say every voter deserves a voice and then defend a system that denies that voice to more than 600,000 New Yorkers of color because they chose not to join a political party?
The real test of a commitment to voting rights is whether you support participation when you’re in power, not when you’re powerless.
If that commitment is genuine, join 1.2 million independent New Yorkers and demand open primaries in New York City.
Gruber is senior vice president of Open Primaries and an independent voter living in Brooklyn.