Thank you, Chairman Mastro and members of the Charter Revision Commission for the opportunity to testify today.
My name is Jim Walden. I am a former Board Member of Citizens Union—New York’s oldest good-government group—and the current Chairman of NYC Common Sense, a newly created City Hall watchdog group.
As a lawyer who has litigated and won election-abuse cases against both Democrats and the Working Families Party, and as a small-I independent candidate for NYC Mayor in the last cycle, I am uniquely positioned to speak in strong support of the proposed Charter Question on open primaries for City elections.
New York City is a one-party town. With the exception of the Giuliani and Bloomberg years, the winner of the Democratic primary usually wins the general election by overwhelming margins—often 70 percent or more. In practice, therefore, the real election is the closed Democratic primary, in which only enrolled Democrats can vote.
That means, as Citizens Union has rightly noted, that more than one million independent New Yorkers are currently shut out of the contest that decides the leadership of our city government.
Everyone else—independents who are unaffiliated with any political party, Republicans, and third-party voters—is sidelined. The result is predictable, low-turnout, and often uncompetitive races that leave millions of New Yorkers feeling their voices do not matter.
Even with the laudable registration gains and the highest turnout in decades seen in last year’s election, the truth is that less than half of registered voters showed up at the ballot box.
During my own run for Mayor, I saw the harmful impacts of this system firsthand: moderate progressives, centrists, and conservatives had no meaningful path to influence the outcome.
Had an open primary system existed in 2025 — with all candidates and all voters participating regardless of party, using ranked-choice voting to advance the top two to the general election—those votes would have actually counted and may well have changed the result by empowering broader coalitions.
This Charter Question changes that. It would give New Yorkers a chance to cast a vote for open primaries for City elections in which every candidate—Democrat, Republican, independent, or from any other party—appears on the same ballot. All registered voters, regardless of party enrollment, can participate using ranked-choice voting. The top two candidates then advance to the general election.
This is not a minor tweak; it is a structural reform that finally makes our elections competitive and representative. Those who have fought for years to make elections more accessible and small-d democratic and railed against voter disenfranchisement should be embracing this change – not rejecting it and protecting the status quo simply because they are now on the inside looking out and not the other way round.
Open primaries restore genuine competition. Instead of the general election becoming a formality, the primary becomes the decisive contest where ideas are tested against the broadest possible electorate. Research from the Bipartisan Policy Center shows that opening primaries to unaffiliated voters increases turnout and produces more representative primary electorates.
Candidates will have to campaign citywide from the start, not just in safe partisan corners. Voter turnout rises when every vote counts, and the public gains a real choice in November.
Equally important, this system favors more moderate and centrist candidates of any party. In closed primaries, the incentive is to appeal only to the most energized base—often the ideological extremes. Ranked-choice voting in an open field rewards candidates who build broader coalitions.
A moderate Democrat can earn second- and third-choice rankings from independents and even some Republicans; a centrist independent or Republican can draw support from frustrated Democrats.
The candidates who advance are those who can unify rather than divide. In a city as diverse as ours, that is exactly the leadership we need on issues from housing affordability to public safety to education.
This reform does not favor one party over another. It simply opens the door so that the best ideas—and the most unifying leaders—can rise, regardless of party label.
I urge the Commission to recommend this Charter Question to the voters.
New Yorkers deserve elections that are competitive, inclusive, and focused on the center rather than the fringes. Open primaries with ranked-choice voting deliver exactly that.
Thank you for your time and your service to our city. I am happy to answer any questions.
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