amny.com39%
Op-Ed | Meet us Mayor Mamdani: The case for opening primaries to NYC independent voters 65%
By Jeremy Gruber77%
8/3/2026, 5:00:40 AM
BS Summary: This article contains 28 faulty reasoning types, including Anecdotal, Biased Writer Voice, and Begging the Question, with Appeal to Emotion as the most egregious example at 17.2% saturation with 106 hits. Analysis detected 921 faulty-reasoning hits from 615 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 51.8% and a BS Rank of 65% (9,958 of 27,739 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 64.10% of the article peer group.
Primaries in New York City are government funded and run.
We all pay for them.
These are public elections.
And yet 1.2 million independent New Yorkers-one in four voters- can’t vote in them.
Independents are a growing part of the future of this city.
And the future should be allowed to vote.
That is why Mayor Mamdani’s recent statement that he is “content” with New York’s closed primary system is so disappointing.
I would invite the mayor to do something simple: meet us.
Talk with independent voters.
Listen to us.
We come from every borough and every walk of life.
Hear why we have chosen to become independent, and what it feels like to be told that we must join a political party whose agenda we don’t support in order to participate in public elections that we pay for and that determine who represents us.
Open Primaries is inviting Mayor Mamdani to join us for a town hall with independent New Yorkers.
We have a simple message: Let Us Vote.
Independents are not merely a statistic or an abstraction. 54 percent of New York’s independent voters are people of color.
That means well over half a million Black, Latino and Asian New Yorkers are shut out of primary elections in our city.
Independents also make up 57 percent of Gen Z and 54 percent of millennials.
Over the last year, hundreds of independent New Yorkers have testified before two Charter Revision Commissions representing two separate administrations.
Their requests have been genuine and heartfelt.
They are asking for nothing more radical than the right to vote.
New York is not the only progressive city confronting this issue.
Washington, D.C., recently moved to open its primaries, joining the 85% of cities that already let independents vote in primaries.
If Washington can recognize that independents are entitled to participate in public elections, why can’t New York?
Political parties have every right to organize, develop platforms, set agendas, recruit candidates and persuade voters.
They should be free to do all of that.
But the First Amendment not only protects the right to associate.
It also protects the right not to associate.
Imagine telling Democrats they had to register as Republicans to vote.
Or telling Republicans they had to register Democratic.
The outrage would be immediate, and justified.
That ought to trouble a city that considers itself progressive.
We deserve the same consideration.
If progressivism means anything, it should mean removing barriers to voting, not defending them simply because they have been around for a long time.
Americans have fought, generation after generation, to expand the franchise.
Racial barriers have been dismantled.
Women won the right to vote.
Citizens who had been deliberately excluded from democracy fought their way in.
Every one of those expansions was opposed by people who insisted the existing system was good enough.History has consistently put those arguments on the wrong side of the moral question.
We believe that if the mayor listens to our stories, he will understand that this is not about political advantage of any kind.
It is about whether New Yorkers should have to give up who they are in order to exercise their right to vote.
Opening New York’s primaries would affirm a simple principle: every New Yorker is equal under the law.
New York’s future belongs to all of its voters.
Its democracy should, too.
Jeremy Gruber is the SVP of Open Primaries, a national election reform organization and an independent voter residing in Brooklyn.
He is the author of “Let All Voters Vote: Independents and the Expansion of Voting Rights in the United States.”
Speakers
2speakers6.0%attributed speech578writer words
Selected voice
100%flagged-word coverageJeremy Gruber
20 attributed words54% of attributed speech80% writer coverage
Attribution is sentence-level. Pattern percentages are calculated only from words assigned to that voice.
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Analysis
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