Spoken Follow-Up Testimony before the New York City Charter Revision Commission

Thank you, Chair Buery and members of the 2025 Charter Revision Commission, for the opportunity to comment on the Commission’s Interim Report, and for considering my prior testimonies. I am John Ketcham, director of cities at the Manhattan Institute, but I’m speaking in my personal capacity.

I commend the Commission’s Interim Report for its proposals to facilitate housing production, move local elections to even years, and potentially to establish top two, fully open primaries that utilize ranked choice voting. I respectfully urge you to put these reforms before city voters this November.

Tonight, I want to focus on two points:

First, I support the proposal to move city elections to even years. But local elections should coincide with gubernatorial, not presidential, elections. Many pressing local issues— including housing and homelessness—depend on local collaboration with Albany. Holding mayoral and gubernatorial elections at the same time would allow candidates for these offices to speak to each other and to voters about how they would work together to address these issues.

This timing would also avoid the noise of presidential campaigns and allow voters to focus more intently on state and local issues, while still turning out in far higher numbers. We might call these “New York, New York” election years.

Second, the Commission should let voters decide whether to restructure local primaries along the lines suggested in the Interim Report. The recent Democratic primary for mayor shows why change is preferable to the status quo.

Though turnout improved, to approximately 30.7% of registered Democrats by my calculation, about 1.78 million registered voters were excluded from that election, including more than 1.1 million unaffiliated voters. Assemblymember Mamdani now heads into November’s general election as the frontrunner having received the support of less than 11% of all registered voters. And the same would likely have been true had Governor Cuomo won. The city now faces a general-election scenario with up to five candidates. We risk electing a mayor with only a small, unrepresentative plurality.

Moving to a “top two” primary that uses “bottoms-up” ranked-choice voting would ameliorate many of these issues. All candidates would appear in the qualifying-round primary, open to all voters. Candidates would thus have more incentive to appeal to a broader and more representative primary electorate.

“Bottoms-up” RCV would successively eliminate the lowest-performing candidate, redistributing that candidate’s ballots to the next-ranked choices, until only two candidates remain. This approach would make fuller use of RCV to select the two candidates who proceed to the general election with broader support. Importantly, it would not impact the way voters rank candidates.

I commend the Commission for proposing to include party labels in such a reformed system. I again suggest that internal party processes determine which candidate bears the party’s endorsement in both the qualifying-round primary and the general election. This would allow voters to understand that the party label implies institutional support, not mere registration.

Thank you for considering my testimony and for your efforts on this vital civic matter.