Frank MacKay, who supported Gov. George Pataki's failed bid in the party's September primary over Rochester businessman B. Thomas Golisano, said the 14 percent showing by Golisano in the November general election has convinced party leaders to push for the measure they believe will make it a real third-party alternative for voters.

Currently, voters in New York must be enrolled in a specific political party in order to vote in primaries. But the push by MacKay would let the 2.3 million New Yorkers who choose not to belong to any party, otherwise known as "blanks" to election officials, to vote in statewide primary contests.

The state Independence Party, the Ross Perot-inspired group whose founders include Golisano, has 257,000 enrolled voters, compared to the state's biggest party, the Democratic Party, which has 5.3 million voters. Golisano received more than 600,000 votes in the Nov. 5 election, finishing third behind Pataki and Democrat H. Carl McCall.

The push by MacKay, to be decided by the party's leadership in February, has a simple theory: try to bolster the party's influence by letting unenrolled voters participate in its primaries. Those voters presumably may stick with that candidate through the general elections in November, thereby making the party's candidate more of a player in November contests.

"We're trying to attract the blanks to our party," MacKay said Tuesday.

Henry Berger, a Democratic election lawyer whose clients have also included Golisano, said he sees no legal obstacle to MacKay's plan. A successful federal lawsuit in Connecticut, which opened the Republican Party primary there to unenrolled voters, will provide the legal cover for the proposal.

But Berger said the plan's impact will be "meaningless."

He said unenrolled voters won't flock to the Independence Party.

"So what will it take them from, 14 percent (of the vote) to 16 percent? The last I looked, that still doesn't win elections," Berger said.

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