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Eliminate all; Bad Upbringing, Poverty, Mental Illness, Greed, Corruption, Addiction and Hate that causes people to commit crime.

Thats from the 128page NYC General Election Voter Guide with matching English and Spanish halves that the Campaign Finance Board sent to New Yorkers mailboxes ahead of this years elections about (almost) nothing.

It comes from a Brooklyn City Council race pitting a Democratic incumbent against a challenger running on the Republican and Conservative lines. Neither offered any information for voters to consider while a third candidate running on a vanity party line including her own name did bother, so the guides Compare Candidates spread has a Crime section with two columns of did not submit a response followed by that rather ambitious Eliminate All agenda.

The cold comfort is that none of it really matters, let alone for Protecting Democracy, since almost no one will turn out and the Democrat here will handily win the most-votes-gets-the-seat general election that follows the ranked-choice primary which also had no real contest and glancingly few voters.

Turnout will be a little better in the handful of districts with competitive general elections, but not by much.

New Yorkers dont agree on a lot but they do onthe futility of participating in a mostly rigged political game, and thats just fine by the people who are rigging it.

Thats not to mention thejudicial elections wheremost ballots will have as many party-picked candidates as there are open seats on the bench so everyones a winner except for voters who have no say at all.

Or the two impenetrable ballot proposals to amend the state Constitution that the voter guide tries to explain, with one in headline case and one in sentence case, for Removal of Small City School Districts From Special Constitutional Debt Limitation and Extending sewage project debt exclusion from debt limit.

Of course, voters already amended New Yorks Constitution to enshrine the nonpartisan election maps Democrats in Albany are nonetheless fighting to redraw for their own benefit in the expectation that having forced the weak governor to put in their selection to lead the Court of Appeals, the states highest court will reverse its earlier ruling rejecting their efforts to pick their voters instead of the other way around.

You dont need to be a Republican to understand the Democrats in control here dont love democracy.

You shouldnt need to a political scientist degree to understand a system that has closed ranked-choice primaries where only party members can vote followed by a traditional most-votes-wins general election open to any registered voter but after most contests have already been effectively decided is inscrutable and corrupt and meant to keep citizens at arms length from their representatives.

Non-partisan elections open to all registered voters would immediately increase turnout and create more competitive contests, but the office holders selected in this jerry-rigged system arent eager to reform themselves out of power and your silence is all the consent they need.

(Eric Adams knew this back in 2003 when he said the system of choosing candidates is not open to all New Yorkers, and the best election system would be. Hed changed his tune by 2021, as he navigated toward a winin a closed primary.)

Early voting has started and you can go to findmypollsite.vote.nyc/ to see whats on your ballot, where you can got to vote early and on Election Day (it may not be the same place) and check out the voting guide and do a little research of your own. Then show up and cast a vote, defaulting in every non-competitive contest toward either the underdog or a write-in pick.

A closing note about the Campaign Finance Board, which also runs the citys public matching funds program, and Adams:

As the boards voting guide explains it, that program helps ensure that campaigns are funded by small dollar donations from New Yorkers, not special interests since When you contribute $10, the candidate receives $90,

Funny, thats almost exactly how the people people cooperating with prosecutors now after getting caught allegedly making donations in other peoples names to Adams winning mayoral campaign explained it:

Make sure its $1000 in your name and $1000 in another persons name because the matching funds is eight-to-one, so $2000 is $16,000.

The Adams campaign which has not been implicated in the DAs case against his straw donors and says it followed all the rules repeatedly ignored the Campaign Finance Boards requests for more information about the supporters who put hundreds of thousands in donations together until long after the campaign was done and it was too late for any take-backs from voters.

Siegel (harrysiegel@gmail.com) is an editor at The City and a columnist for the Daily News.

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NYC is protecting democracy, but hardly has one - New York Daily News