earching for ways to bolster its standing after a sound defeat in the governor's race, the chairman of the Independence Party said this week that he would propose that voters unaffiliated with any party be allowed to vote in Independence primaries for statewide and federal offices.

Political analysts have long questioned the viability of the party without a prominent figure like Tom Golisano, the Rochester billionaire who, in his third bid for governor, won just 14 percent of the vote despite spending more than $65 million of his own money.

Advertisement

Mr. Golisano, who has said he does not know whether he will run again, has not played an active role in the internal organization of the party he founded eight years ago. He promised recently to become more involved in efforts to strengthen it, a vow that party leaders welcomed, but they have decided to press on without him if necessary.

Frank MacKay, the chairman, said in an interview on Wednesday that he was passing around a memo to party leaders and would formally propose the change in primary voting at the party's next meeting, in February. Mr. MacKay said he expected that many of the 2.2 million unaffiliated New York voters, known as blanks, would ultimately decide to enroll in the Independence Party, whose leaders include disaffected former Republicans and Democrats and voters on the political fringe.

"Our hope is the blank voters will take it as a message that we want them and they will choose to affiliate with us," said Mr. MacKay, whose party's enrollment stands at about 257,000, making the party the third largest in the state. (Independence leaders have acknowledged that many of their members thought they were registering as independent.)

Under current state law, only voters registered in a party can vote in primaries and only in their party's primary. New York is one of 18 states in which one or more parties have such closed primaries, according to the National Association of Secretaries of State.

If the State Legislature declines to change the law as Mr. MacKay proposes — and aides to senior lawmakers said they could not imagine that the proposal would gain ground among legislators protecting their power — he said he expected the party to take its effort to the courts.

Mr. MacKay noted that in 1986 the United States Supreme Court backed a similar move by the Republican Party of Connecticut to open its primaries to unaffiliated voters.

Richard Schrader, a Democratic political consultant who has studied the issue, said unaffiliated voters who participate in primaries in the states that permit it rarely enroll in any party in large numbers.

"These loyalties were elastic and not long-term," he said.

Even if the law is not changed, Mr. MacKay said, the party is here to stay and, in order to get the 50,000 votes it needs to stay on state ballots, would cross-endorse a major party candidate for governor in 2006 if Mr. Golisano or another well-financed candidate does not run.