Right and WRONG ways to fix NYC primary elections

Mayor Eric Adams’ City Charter Revision Commission just floated two dueling ideas for reforming city primary elections — one excellent, one awful.

The good one would allow “open primaries”: Voters with no political party affiliation could choose a party primary to vote in when they go to the polls, rather than having to affiliate months ahead of time.

This would dethrone the party insiders who now dominate the Republican and Democratic primaries, increasing competition in a clear win for the general public.

The bad reform would create a “non-partisan primary”: All candidates would compete on a single ballot, with the top two vote-winners (regardless of party) facing off in the November general election.

That would finish off the already-weakened local two-party system, turning most contests into Democrat vs. Democrat and reducing real competition.

Open primaries are the rule in much of the country, and work just fine.

California is the main place to have adopted nonpartisan primaries, and they seem to have fed the Golden State’s decline to the point where, for the first time ever, it’s now shrinking relative to the rest of the nation.

The proposals come on the heels of a city Campaign Finance Board report showing nearly a million New York voters are unaffiliated and so excluded from taxpayer-supported primary elections, and as Adams feels he was driven out of the Democratic Party.

We’re guessing the commission listed both ideas in its report to get some feedback as to which reform makes more sense to put on the November ballot; to us, the choice is clear.

Open primaries genuinely open up the process; nonpartisan ones actually reduce real choice.

The Charter Commission can offer the voters a real chance to improve local politics by putting the open-primary reform on the ballot.

But if it opts to push the nonpartisan-primary experiment instead, it risks sending New York City into a downward spiral with no end in sight.