The proposal from the chairman, Jay Jacobs, would quintuple the number of votes that a political party needs to guarantee a spot on the ballot in the next election. A party currently needs 50,000 votes for its candidate for governor to secure a spot for the next four years.
Jacobs, in a private email to a group of state commissioners reviewing parts of New York election law, proposed raising the number to roughly 250,000.
At first glance, it might seem a strange position for any Democrat, let alone the head of the state’s Democratic Party, to take.
Nearly every minor party has fallen short of collecting 250,000 votes, including, and perhaps especially, the Working Families Party, a progressive group that shares many Democratic Party ideals yet has been one of the most reliable antagonists of Jacobs and his close ally Cuomo.
Only the Conservative Party has been able to surpass the 250,000-vote mark in recent years. If just that party survived, a candidate could then run on both the Conservative and Republican lines — New York election law allows candidates to run on multiple lines — while a liberal candidate would have no such advantage.
“Conservatives have an awful lot of support,” Jacobs said when asked about the idea. “There’s no question that they will have an easier time meeting these thresholds.
“I can see that that could be problematic,” he added.
Jacobs, whom Cuomo appointed to the state commission, insisted that his proposal was aimed at reducing voter confusion and rooting out corruption among “sham” parties that he said trade their ballot lines for political favors. He did not specify which parties he was referring to.
“A lot of people have been getting away with an awful lot for a long time,” Jacobs said. “In my mind, it will be better overall if elections are run with only really credible parties.”
For the WFP and its supporters, the proposal is the latest attempt by Jacobs and Cuomo to silence one of their most prominent political rivals. For the past few months, Jacobs has all but declared war on third parties, advancing multiple proposals to ban them. Cuomo, though he has not explicitly sought to ban the WFP, has said that he knew Jacobs’ stance when he chose him for the commission.
The dispute is also the most recent front in the feud between Cuomo and an increasingly emboldened mass of left-wing activists and politicians who have cast Cuomo and his allies as centrists bent on obstruction.
Jacobs made the proposal in an email Oct. 16, soon after a meeting of the commission. It was created by the Legislature in April to design a small-donor matching system for state elections, but in the months since, much to the angst of the WFP, the commission also turned to the question of third parties.
In the email, Jacobs asked a lawyer for the group, as well as the other eight commissioners, whether it had the power to raise the threshold for a guaranteed ballot line.
Traditionally, the WFP and other minor parties had been able to meet the 50,000-vote threshold relatively easily, in part because candidates are allowed to run on multiple lines, known as fusion voting. Progressives can, for example, choose to vote for the Democratic candidate on the WFP line to send a message about their political priorities without worrying about wasting a vote.
Jacobs asked the lawyer if the commission could require parties to achieve “an amount equal to 2% of all registered voters in the state” in races for president and governor.
Two percent of New York’s 12,695,762 registered voters is 253,915 votes. In the last election for governor, the Conservative Party collected 253,624 votes. The WFP, the next highest vote-getter, collected about 114,000.
Jacobs said the details of the proposal were not final. He said he had not yet discussed it with his fellow commissioners, who must vote to approve it.
But he reaffirmed his commitment to a 250,000-vote benchmark, arguing that allowing too many parties — especially if the state were to adopt a public matching funds program — could spiral out of financial control.
The commission will make its recommendations in November. They will have the force of law unless they are changed by the Legislature within three weeks.
A 250,000-vote threshold — roughly 4% of turnout in the 2018 governor’s election or 6% of the 2014 turnout — would be almost unmatched in its difficulty, said Richard Winger, editor of Ballot Access News, a publication that covers laws affecting minor parties.
“It would be in the company of Alabama; I don’t think New York has considered that state a model,” Winger said. Alabama requires parties to collect a number of petitions equal to 3% of the last vote for governor.
Texas this year lowered its threshold from 5% of the vote in a statewide contest to 2%.
Jacobs also pointed to Virginia and New Jersey as states that require parties to win 10% of turnout in the last governor’s race. But independent candidates there can also qualify by collecting a certain number of petition signatures — in the case of New Jersey, just 100 signatures for a candidate for the House of Representatives.
That disparity has worried the WFP and other minor parties, even among those who acknowledge that 50,000 might be too low of a threshold. And it has fueled already-rampant speculation in certain quarters about Jacobs’ — and the governor’s — true intentions.
Some have accused Cuomo, through Jacobs, of seeking to undermine the WFP, even at the cost of fellow Democrats’ electoral victories, in order to maintain his grip on power in an increasingly blue Albany.
“I honestly have never understood why it is that, electorally, the governor cannot seem and act as interested as we are in having as many Democrats in the state Legislature as possible,” Sen. Jessica Ramos, a Democrat who won her seat with WFP support last year, said.
She acknowledged that it was Jacobs, not Cuomo, who put the proposal forward. But, she said, “there is no question that the two work very closely.”
Rich Azzopardi, a senior adviser to Cuomo, denied the connection. “Per usual, we don’t know what Sen. Ramos is talking about,” he said. “It’s not our proposal, but ultimately legislators would have the option to weigh in on what the commission ultimately decides.”
Cuomo’s long, tortured history with the WFP, which has consistently sought to nudge him to the left, has led to some unusual moments.
In 2014, Cuomo created a new third party, the Women’s Equality Party, that was widely seen as an attempt to draw voters away from its similarly initialed counterpart, the WFP.
Jacobs’ proposal would exclude the Women’s Equality Party as well — a prospect that Jacobs, in a rare divergence from Cuomo, seemed to welcome.
“The Women’s Equality Party, they just support Democrats,” he said Monday. “These are sham parties.”
Jacobs, asked if he had spoken to the governor about the proposal, parried.
“What I would only say is — this is not going to sound like the answer you want — but I never discuss what I discuss with the governor,” he said. “I wouldn’t assume that because I’m not answering it, it’s an answer you won’t like. It’s just, if I begin to say on the one hand one thing, and another time I don’t answer, it gives a different implication than I want.”
Still, he insisted on his independence: “What I do and what I say on this commission have nothing to do with anyone else’s views: not the governor, not anyone.”
This article originally appeared in
.