By Josh Shipper

Term limits and campaign finance, as it turns out, were not enough.

This month, one third of the City Council candidates in Queens were stricken from the ballot when their petitions were invalidated. The majority of those disqualified were running against a well-supported party candidate. The Queens County Democratic organization sent a team of a dozen lawyers to represent their candidates and challenge opponents. Louisa Chan, a candidate in district 25 in Jackson Heights, left the courtroom in tears. Like the rest of the candidates opposing a party machine, she was fighting against patronage, money, resources, and a guaranteed wall of endorsements -- an apparently unbeatable combination.

"Despite all the popular rhetoric about reform," wrote Michael Bloomberg in a recent Newsday article, "old-fashioned political bosses, not the people, still dominate political life in New York City." It is time, he said, to take them out.

How would he do so? Non-partisan elections.

Mayor Rudy Giuliani supports the idea. At a recent press conference, the mayor told reporters that nonpartisan elections would "continue to help move the city out of domination by one political party. I was only the third Republican mayor in 100 years." Support comes as well from New York's Independence Party, which includes it in its platform. "The idea is a frightening one for our partisan system," says Frank MacKay, the chairman of the Independence Party.

Nonpartisan elections, where candidates would be prohibited from running as the choice of any party or under their banner, are designed to remove political parties from local government. Its advocates argue that this would open the ballot to a wider range of candidates and ideas, and force citizens to become more informed voters.

If all of those reasons aren't enough, proponents say, consider the fact that we already have nonpartisan elections in New York -- and have had them since 1989, when an amendment to the City Charter required that special elections to fill sudden vacancies be nonpartisan.

These, though, happen only about once a year. More compelling perhaps is that New York is one of the few major cities left in the United States that does not use them to select all its public officials.

A HISTORY OF IDEALISM

The argument for nonpartisan elections is simple. It is based on the old saying, "You don't need to be Republican or Democrat to pave a road."

The job of a member of the city council, proponents say, is not to debate national issues, but to preserve the neighborhood park, make sure trash is picked up, and occasionally fix a pothole or two. All of these do not require partisan solutions.

The nonpartisan election was a Progressive reform introduced around the turn of the 20th Century in response to party machines that in effect ran municipal governments. The Progressive Party was strongest out West and in Texas, which is why most cities there had the format written into their original charters. Progressives wanted city governments to be more responsive to community needs, less vulnerable to the self-interested manipulation of party hacks. They wanted to sever public servants' allegiances to political parties.

Today, at least three-quarters of all municipalities in the United States use nonpartisan elections, including Los Angeles, San Francisco, Houston, Dallas, and Seattle. Chicago made the switch in 1999.

Nonpartisan elections are intended to bring about reform in several ways.

By prohibiting parties from running candidates, advocates say, they remove party influence from the race. During the do-or-die period of petitioning when candidates in New York now rely on party organizations for help, such a reform could level the playing field.

It also opens the ballot to a wider range of candidates who don't need to adjust their ideas to win the approval of parties. And, advocates say, by stripping voters of their most useful cue -- party affiliation -- nonpartisan ballots are also intended to force voters to search out more information on a candidate. A more active and informed citizenry could increase voter turnout.

STEALTH PARTISANSHIP?

Some candidates see the idea of non-partisan elections as a thinly-disguised scheme to increase the chances for a Republican win in this overwhelmingly Democratic city. "If my poll numbers looked like his," a spokesman for Fernando Ferrer responded to Bloomberg's proposal, "I'd call for nonvoter elections."

According to some political scientists who are studying nonpartisan elections, there is a significant discrepancy between what nonpartisan elections are intended to do, and what they actually do - or need to do.

Despite the complaints, for example, "party dominance" is not what it used to be, says Richard Briffault, a professor at Columbia University School of Law who specializes in election law. In New York's Democratic primary elections, while party organizations can endorse candidates, they no longer have the power to select who can run in the first place.

"In cities like New York, parties are not filtering the ideas of candidates," adds Matthew Streb, a political science professor at Loyola Marymount University. "They are primarily fundraising bodies."

Then there is the argument advocates use that local problems do not require partisan solutions. Briffault disagrees, at least when it comes to many decisions that the mayor must make. "The real question is, do Republicans and Democrats take different approaches when dealing with larger issues like education and crime?" says Briffault. To him, it is clear that they do.

Critics are also skeptical that non-partisan elections will promote a more informed citizenry. To Brian Schaffner of Indiana University, who with Streb is part of a group of political scientists researching nonpartisan elections, this is one of the worst myths. "It is unrealistic to think that people are going to go out and get more information on candidates," he says. Quite to the contrary, their research has shown that when voters cannot rely on party affiliations to guide their vote, instead of investigating the candidates further, they are most likely to use the next best cue, which in most cases is incumbency, name recognition, or ethnicity. But the team would much rather see people vote based on party, because, they believe, it is the most effective cue for determining what a candidate will do if elected.

And far from increasing voter turnout, in fact, the researchers discovered that nonpartisan elections often actually depress voter turnout. Without a "team" to root for, they say, voters become less interested in the race. They have also found that voters often leave a ballot blank when they are not given party affiliations because they are less sure who to vote for.

Then, rather than being a way to make the process of elections more open and responsive, critics claim, nonpartisan elections achieve something quite different. "The history of nonpartisan elections is a history of moneyed elites trying to manipulate the people," says Dan Cantor, executive director of the Working Families Party. "They are a way for wealthy candidates from unpopular parties to get on the ballot. They create no advantage for smaller party candidates except for politicians like Mike Bloomberg and Ross Perot who mistake their money for intelligence."

If all this were not argument enough, critics make one final point: Even if nonpartisan elections were a good idea for New York City, would they even be possible? According to Briffault, it is unconstitutional to bar parties from endorsing candidates or giving them money.

If parties can still endorse candidates in a nonpartisan election, it is hard to imagine them staying out of a race. Party machines would most likely continue to pick favorites and shovel funds into their campaigns.

SLIM CHANCE

The chances of nonpartisan elections taking over New York City are slim. There is a long tradition of partisan politics here. State law is based upon political parties. No grassroots organizations seem to be taking up the cause. That may be why the past two Charter Revision Commissions, though formed by Mayor Giuliani with the intention of implementing this new election format, have rejected the idea. And the proposal has lost steam in recent weeks. This year's Commission did not even mention the idea at its first public meeting.

The idea still appeals to some, however. Three-quarters of the nation's municipalities can't all be wrong.

Take Los Angeles, an example used by advocates because the city's last mayor was Republican. This indicates to some that nonpartisan elections have weakened the influence of the city's Democratic organization.

Another example used by advocates is from right here in New York: special elections for vacated City Council seats, which occur on the average only once or twice a year. The last such election was held in February to fill the central Bronx's 15th District (seat vacated by Jose Rivera. The race was contested by two Democrats, Edwin Ortiz, and Joel Rivera, son of Jose, and the Bronx Democratic organization's candidate. The voter turnout for this nonpartisan special election was touted as surprisingly high for a City Council election in the middle of February.

Since the turnout was actually only around 12 percent, this may say less about the value of nonpartisan elections than it does the indifference of voters in the 15th district. In any case, it was only a fiction that it was nonpartisan; the victor, Joel Rivera, was clearly the choice of the Bronx Democratic party machine .

And when advocates point to L.A.'s nonpartisan elections allowing for a Republican mayor, critics point out that New York City's current mayor is Republican, too, demonstrating that the party is perfectly capable of winning in a major city without the aid of nonpartisan elections.

THE PERSISTENCE OF PARTIES

The debate over nonpartisan elections seems to boil down to the value of political parties in our nation today. Are they inevitable, desirable, or do they impinge on the ability of a democracy to function? Our Founding Fathers did not anticipate the rise of dominant parties--no where in the Constitution are they mentioned--and they warned about the potential of large factions to bring politics to a stalemate.

"The public good is disregarded in the conflicts of rival parties," wrote James Madison in The Federalist Papers. "Measures are too often decided, not according to the rules of justice and the rights of the minor party, but by the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority."

Bloomberg, taking a page from Madison, persists.

This week, he wrote a letter to the Chairman of the Charter Revision Commission Randy Mastro urging him to reconsider nonpartisan elections for the November ballot. "By eliminating the partisan primary," he said, "nonpartisan elections prevent a small segment of registered voters from determining the outcome of the general electionâ¤| By opening our electoral system to all candidates, we can create a new climate for politics in this city, one that encourages political minorities and broader political debate."

While the theoretical discussion continues, Council candidates in Louisa Chan's district are now learning the everyday facts of party machine politics. Chan was one of six Democratic candidates in District 25 initially knocked off the ballot by the Queens County Democratic organization. The organization, which is backing candidate Helen Sears, convinced a judge to strike 200 signatures from Chan's petition because people used the abbreviation "NYC" and then crossed it out. Several days ago, Chan won a difficult appeal, and, for now, is back on the ballot. But her temporary disqualification caused her to lose any pubic funding she might have had to continue her campaign. She now has to wait until September 6th, five days before the primary, for the Campaign Finance Board to approve her funds.

Others candidates, like S. Terry Lewis, were not as fortunate as Chan.

"I believe my campaign is over for 2001," she said. "We simply don't have the funds to fight this challenge."

Indeed, what the campaign finance program and term limits were supposed to create--a ballot open to challengers representing different views--local party machines have managed to take away. New Yorkers supported those two initiatives several years ago, and so it is hard to believe that they would support the elimination of a candidate based on some abbreviated addresses.

"The petition challenges are meant to weed out fraud," said Chan, "not to weed out opponents of party machines. This is an election by the people. If I get beaten by the people at the voting booths, that is one thing. But if I get beaten by a party machine, that is not democracy," she said.

Party machines do not play the role they used to, but it is hard to ignore their power in local elections. After the first round of petition challenges, it is clear that while incumbents may be gone, parties are not; and while public funds are available to all, party funds are not.

But few people agree with Bloomberg that the answer is nonpartisan elections. They may be one way to check parties' influence, but in the end, they create more problems than they solve.