Matt Yglesias

What If They Gave an Election and Nobody Came

Outgoing Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau

Lying at the intersection of two bad aspects of American governance—partisan elections for local offices in essentially one-party jurisdictions, and the overabundance of elected officials—comes today’s New York City primary:

Tuesday is primary day in New York City, but don’t feel bad if it slipped your mind. As few as one in six enrolled Democrats are expected to vote, despite competitive races for two citywide offices. [...] The most consequential contest is the three-way race to succeed Robert M. Morgenthau, who has served as Manhattan district attorney since 1975. Because no Republican is running, the winner on Tuesday is all but assured to be the next district attorney. [...]

Voters have been inundated by television and printed advertisements from the four Democrats seeking to succeed Mr. Thompson as comptroller and the five vying to succeed Betsy Gotbaum, who is not seeking re-election as public advocate. If no candidate garners at least 40 percent of the vote in those races, a runoff between the top two finishers will be held on Sept. 29. [...]

Nearly 3.2 million Democrats are eligible to vote on Tuesday, but the turnout “will be low, possibly the lowest in recent memory,” said Prof. John H. Mollenkopf of the City University Graduate Center.

The purpose of having elected officials, as opposed to a self-perpetuating oligarchy like China, ought to be to enhance accountability. But elections only work as an effective accountability mechanism if we can reasonably expect the voters to monitor the elected officials and have some understanding of what they’re responsible for. A resident of New York City is responsible for electing a mayor, a city comptroller, a district attorney, a city council member, a borough president, two state legislators, a member of the U.S. congress, two U.S. senators, a governor, an attorney-general, and a state comptroller along with various judges. It seems to me that very few people actually know the name of all the different people who hold those offices, which I think we can take as a sign that they’re not monitoring their performance. It would make more sense to just eliminate some of this stuff (unicameral state legislatures would work fine, the “borough” level of government is obsolete) and make some of the offices appointed.

Meanwhile, having partisan elections in a place like New York City (or Washington, DC) manages to semi-disenfranchise the city’s registered Republicans while basically obscuring the issues at stake in the elections. I’m a big defender of partisanship against David Broder style whining. But that’s because partisanship at the federal level is a useful tool for clarifying policy issues and generating a measure of coherence and accountability to legislative operations. That’s because the parties are coherently organized around the main issues in national politics. The issues in local politics are pretty different. It might make the most sense to just have different parties at the national and local levels (like how Canada’s provincial parties are different from the federal ones) but barring that it would make sense for New York and DC to do what many other cities have already done and just shift to non-partisan elections.

William Bratton Steps Down as LAPD Chief

This seems like a definitely loss to the world:

Chief William J. Bratton announced Wednesday that he would leave the Los Angeles Police Department after nearly seven years to lead a private international security firm.

At a City Hall news conference here, Mr. Bratton said he was resigning effective Oct. 31 to become chief executive officer of Altegrity Security Consulting, a new unit of Altegrity, whose headquarters are in New York.

One of the most important things in the world is trying to make public institutions work well, since the less-effective ones don’t just naturally go out of business the way corporations do. And yet unfortunately this isn’t something we know a great deal about. One thing we do know, however, is that first in Boston then in New York City and then in Los Angeles Bratton has put together an impressive record of presiding over police departments that succeed in reducing the incidence of crime both in absolute terms and relative to national trends. We need more people like that in public service.

Rep John McHugh Bolsters GOP Ranks Inside Obama Administration

We already have Robert Gates and Ray LaHood and Jon Huntsman, and now Carl Hulse reports that another Republicans will be joining the Obama administration as Rep John McHugh (R-NY) agrees to serve as Secretary of the Army:

Democrats say they would have a chance at winning the seat though it would still favor a Republican candidate. If Democrats were able to flip the representation, it would leave only two Republicans in the state’s 29-member House delegation with redistricting looming after the 2010 Census.

My guess is that the main political implications here relate to redistricting. Even if a Republican wins the seat, a cloutless freshperson is going to be a very likely candidate for getting screwed-over in a redistricting process that’s likely to require New York to eliminate a congressional district.