New York City currently has two separate commissions each claiming the power to rewrite the city’s constitution and put questions on your November ballot. One of them was created by a mayor on his way out the door, voided by a line buried in the state budget, and is still holding hearings anyway. The fight over which one counts will help decide something that touches every voter in the city: whether you can cast a primary ballot for a party you are not registered with.
Here is how the city ended up with dueling panels. On December 31, 2025, his last day in office, former Mayor Eric Adams appointed a 15-member Charter Revision Commission, the maximum the state’s Municipal Home Rule Law allows. Its assignment was to study open primaries and nonpartisan elections, the idea that any registered voter should be able to vote in a primary regardless of party.
The good-government group Citizens Union did not read it as good-faith reform. Executive director Grace Rauh called the last-minute panel a “power grab” that appeared designed to disrupt the incoming Mamdani administration and block the City Council’s own charter panel from reaching the ballot, and noted it was the fourth charter commission announcement in the previous twenty months.
Then Albany handed the new mayor an off switch. Folded into the 2026 state budget was a measure by State Senator John Liu of Queens, the ERIC Act, short for Election-Related Requirements for Initiating Charter Commissions, which makes a charter commission’s survival depend on confirmation by whoever is mayor on January 1. The text of Liu’s bill, S8934, ties a commission’s continued existence to that confirmation. It was written to be retroactive to November 4, 2025, timed precisely so the incoming mayor could nullify Adams’s panel, and it passed not as a standalone bill on its merits but as part of a must-pass budget measure. A Queens Chronicle editorial flagged the catch: a retroactive law aimed at undoing one specific commission could invite a legal challenge centered on due process.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani used the new power on May 27, voiding the Adams commission in a one-page notice that invoked the Municipal Home Rule Law. The next day he launched his own panel, the Commission on Government Efficiency, or COGE, chaired by Patrick Gaspard, the former executive director of the Democratic National Committee and U.S. ambassador to South Africa. Mamdani charged the commission with reviewing the entire city charter and holding 10 public hearings across the five boroughs before sending proposals to voters in November.
The voided commission did not accept the verdict. Its pro bono counsel, Randy Mastro, said it would keep working and signaled a legal fight. The same week Mamdani dissolved it, the Adams panel held its first public hearing in the Bronx and, after testimony from just five people, advanced a ballot question to create open primaries anyway. Under that proposal, every candidate would run in a single open primary, every registered voter could participate regardless of party, and the top two finishers would advance to the general election, for offices from mayor and comptroller to City Council.
A commission named for government efficiency is now the product of about as inefficient a process as the city can manufacture: by Citizens Union’s count, the fourth charter commission in twenty months, two of them at this moment claiming the same November ballot. And everyone is racing the clock. Citizens Union has warned that the scramble to get questions onto the ballot would leave little time for public input, research and deliberation, and points out that the deadline to file ballot questions falls in the first week of August. Its proposed fix is structural rather than partisan: amend the Municipal Home Rule Law so a commission appointed in a mayor’s final six months has to be confirmed by the incoming mayor within 90 days or dissolve.
Strip away the turf war and the question in front of voters is a big one. Open primaries would be one of the largest changes to how New Yorkers vote in a generation, and in a city where the Democratic primary is frequently the entire contest, letting unaffiliated voters in could reshape who wins. Whether that question even reaches your ballot, and in which commission’s version, is what this fight is actually about.
You do not have to take any of their word for it. COGE is collecting public testimony right now, and that testimony is the raw material for whatever it puts on the November ballot. The first hearing is June 9 at 5 p.m. at New York Law School in Manhattan, followed by June 10 at Fordham University in the Bronx and June 11 at Brooklyn Law School, with 10 hearings in all across the five boroughs. If you have a view on open primaries, or on anything else about how the city is run, that is the room where it lands, and the window closes at the August ballot-filing deadline.
Featured image: Tony Webster from Minneapolis, M / CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
