In June 2026, in a hearing room on Staten Island, a handful of people asked a city commission to do something New Yorkers have been asked to consider — and have declined to do — for more than twenty years: let everybody vote in the primary.
More than a million New York City voters are registered without a party. By the Campaign Finance Board’s count they are the second-largest bloc in the city, ahead of Republicans and behind only Democrats. In most council districts and most citywide races the Democratic primary is the election; the general is a formality. So those million people are enrolled, eligible, and shut out of the only round that decides anything. That is what a closed primary does.
What most of the city has forgotten is that there was once an entire political party built around that single complaint. It held Row C — the third line on every New York City ballot, directly under the Democrats and the Republicans — for more than a decade. It helped put a mayor in office three times. Then it broke apart, lost its ballot status, and finally had its own name written out of state law.
Contents
- What the Independence Party of New York City was
- The platform of the Independence Party of New York: open primaries and the “anti-party party”
- How the third line on the ballot became a kingmaker: fusion voting explained
- The candidates who carried the Independence Party line
- Party registration: the 400,000 registered voters who may not have meant it
- How the money worked: campaign finance, expenditure and a $1.1 million theft
- The split over Fulani, and the fight for the county committees
- How the party lost its ballot line — and then its name
- How you get on a New York City ballot now: petitions and independent candidates
- The argument is back before the city: open primaries in 2026
What the Independence Party of New York City was
The Independence Party of New York State was founded in 1991 by Gordon Black, Tom Golisano and Laureen Oliver, upstate around Rochester. It is routinely filed away as Ross Perot’s New York vehicle, which is not quite right: the party existed before Perot’s 1992 run, spent the mid-nineties affiliated with the Reform Party he founded in 1995, and broke from it in 2000.
It won ballot status across New York State in 1994 as the Independence Fusion Party, after a merger with a Bronx-based Independent Fusion Party, when Golisano’s fourth-place finish in the governor’s race cleared the bar. Under the election law of the time, a party that took 50,000 votes in a gubernatorial election held an automatic ballot line for four years. Golisano cleared it again in 1998 and 2002, and the party climbed to the third line — the ballot position it held from 1999 through 2010.
The New York City half of the story begins the same year it got its line. In 1994 the New Alliance Party dissolved, and a group around the psychotherapist Fred Newman and the activist Lenora Fulani moved into the Independence Party, bringing a practised petitioning operation and a base of registered voters with them. The five borough organizations they built became the largest — and by a distance the strangest — wing of the party.
They were not modest about the scale. The city organizations claimed over 100,000 members in New York City and nearly 5,000 people seated on county committees across all five boroughs, the bodies that under state law actually govern a party at local level. Those are the party’s own figures and were contested. What is not contested is that they were the only county organizations in New York that held onto real control of their own nominations.
The platform of the Independence Party of New York: open primaries and the “anti-party party”
The core principle was simple, and the city organizations stated it as their mission for two decades: political parties should have less power over who gets elected, and voters should have more. Every other plank is downstream of that one.
The specific reform they wanted above all others was nonpartisan municipal elections. A single primary election open to every voter and every candidate regardless of enrollment, with the top two advancing to November — replacing a system in which only party members may vote to choose party nominees.
Their own summary of where that logic ends is the most useful sentence they ever wrote about themselves:
“we are known as the anti-party party, since those reforms would effectively put us out of business.”
— Cathy Stewart, citywide coordinator, December 2012
The rest of the platform followed from it. They described themselves as “a new kind of minor party that is genuinely independent, built from the bottom up and not tied to the Democratic and Republican parties” — a direct shot at the Conservative and Working Families parties, which in New York function largely as satellites of the two major parties, trading their lines for influence over the major-party nominee. They pushed for ballot-access reform