[EM] Wilson-Pakula - an odd New York law

[Dave Ketchum]

Basing the following on NY law.

Each voter, who chooses to, enrolls in ONE party (state keeps registration 
records, so one voter cannot be enrolled in multiple parties).

Votes in the election for governor determine which parties shall be 
recognized as such and each own a line on the ballot for the next four years.

At primary election, voters of each party elect:
      Members of their state and county committees.
      Candidates to be on their line at general election.

Members of the party in the county containing East Harlem elected a county 
committee.  That committee may have assigned this task to a sub-committee 
since the county contains many districts.

Groups of at least 5% of party members in a district can each designate a 
candidate for primary election (lower limits when they deserve an exception 
in the law to the standard need).  For one office no voter can designate 
more than one.  Has no effect on who may designate for other offices.

Assuming 1000 party members in Vito's district, a designating petition 
would have required 50 signatures.  Before Wilson-Pakula that is all it 
took.  Considering the 1000 members, others COULD HAVE SIGNED competing 
designating petitions.  Considering Vito's popularity, questionable whether 
50 signers could have been found for such - or that such could have beat 
Vito for primary votes if it came to that.

With Wilson-Pakula the party committee could reject outsiders such as Vito. 
  In general this makes sense (and gets used by most parties to reject 
unwanted outsiders) - if the outsider deserves electing let them:
      Get nominated by their own party if their party has a ballot line.
      Get independent nomination by petition - though that takes more 
signatures since all voters are available for signing.

On Tue, 21 Oct 2008 08:25:27 -0400 Fred Gohlke wrote:
> Good Afternoon, Dave
> 
> Thank you for the Vito Marcantonio story.  The story is not unique, but 
> it is a good example of how political parties make rules and enact laws 
> that give them a stranglehold on our political infrastructure.
> 
> Parties are institutions of humans.  They function precisely as a 
> thoughtful person should expect them to function; they put their 
> interest ahead of the public interest ... always.  It is amazing so few 
> people recognize (or are willing to acknowledge) that political parties 
> are profoundly anti-democratic.

Where might the public interest reside?  The 1940s was not a good time for 
claiming electing a Communist qualified as such.

Parties and their organization are products of the humans who create them. 
  Remember that EACH member of a party has a RIGHT (at least in NY) to ask 
other members to designate them as candidates for county committee.

A bit of history from my county:
      County committee chair in one party got enough committee members to 
let him substitute for them to be able to hold committee meetings in a 
telephone booth if he chose to.
      When his doings created enough unhappiness, some members accepted 
responsibility for running for county committee office, got themselves 
elected, and the now ex-chair lost interest in the committee.

How about YOUR county - could and should YOU take responsibility for 
attending to your party's needs?
> 
> For the most part, the commentary on this site concerns itself with 
> gaining some form of representation for purportedly under-represented 
> partisans.  I suspect that effort is driven by the quest for power by 
> those who feel they are disenfranchised by the present system.  We would 
> be better served if they sought the benefit of society rather than some 
> subset of it.
> 
> It is unwise to continue to ignore the very obvious fact that parties, 
> themselves, are the problem.  In the United States, we have just 
> watched, helpless, as our elected representatives placed an enormous 
> burden on us and our progeny, not because of conviction it was necessary 
> to do so, but because they were given 100 billion of our dollars as bribes.
> 
> How can sane men watch such travesties and not realize that the pursuit 
> of self-interest, which is a very natural and important trait in each of 
> us, is the force we must learn to harness?  The notion that our 
> government can be improved by forming additional centers of oligarchical 
> power is ludicrous.
> 
> We can not, and should not, deny our own tendency toward partisanship. 
> Instead, we must devise an independent process that includes all of us 
> and harnesses our natural tendency to seek our own interest.  We must 
> make self-interest a tool in our arsenal rather than leaving it for 
> others to wield against us.
> 
> Fred
-- 
  davek at clarityconnect.com    people.clarityconnect.com/webpages3/davek
  Dave Ketchum   108 Halstead Ave, Owego, NY  13827-1708   607-687-5026
            Do to no one what you would not want done to you.
                  If you want peace, work for justice.