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The Independence Party of New York City, Explained

By Nora Kinsella · Updated · 16 min read

The Independence Party of New York City

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 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 and for cutting the petition burden that keeps an independent candidate off the ballot. They ran a permanent argument about electoral accountability: that incumbents in safe seats have insulated themselves from any real contest, and that a closed primary in a one-party town is the mechanism that lets them do it.

That argument is worth taking on its own terms, because it is the part that survived the party. In a district where the primary decides the winner and only enrolled party members can vote in it, an incumbent needs to satisfy a small, reliable slice of the electorate and nobody else. Whether you think that amounts to a democratic system working as designed or a closed shop depends on where you sit — but the mechanism is not in dispute, and it is exactly what open-primary advocates are still pointing at.

Bloomberg put nonpartisan elections to the city as a charter question in November 2003. Voters rejected it. The party went on campaigning for it for another fifteen years.

How the third line on the ballot became a kingmaker: fusion voting explained

New York is one of the few states that allows fusion voting: a candidate can appear on more than one ballot line, and the votes from each line are added together. That single rule is what turns a minor party with a good ballot position into something a mayoral campaign has to negotiate with. The Independence line is the clearest demonstration the city has produced.

The party endorsed Michael Bloomberg in 2001, 2005 and 2009. Here is what the third line did in his last race, per the certified results:

2009 general election Votes Share
Michael Bloomberg — total 585,466 50.7%
  — on the Republican line 435,393 37.7%
  — on the Independence / Jobs & Education line 150,073 13.0%
Bill Thompson — total 534,869 46.3%
  — on the Democratic line 506,995 43.9%
  — on the Working Families line 27,874 2.4%
Margin 50,597 4.4 pts

The incumbent beat the Democratic nominee by 50,597 votes. The Independence line delivered 150,073 — about three times the margin. Take Row C away and Bloomberg does not get a third term. The same arithmetic had held in 2001, when he beat Mark Green by 35,489 votes in a race where the Independence and Students First lines were folded into his total.

That is the practical case for a minor party in this state. It almost never wins an office. It decides who does.

The candidates who carried the Independence Party line

Notable names that appeared on the Independence ballot line, and what the line produced:

  • Tom Golisano — gubernatorial candidate 1994, 1998, 2002. The party’s founder-financier and the reason it had a line at all.
  • Michael Bloomberg — mayoral, 2001, 2005, 2009. 150,073 votes on the line in 2009.
  • Ralph Nader — president, 2004. 84,247 votes on the Independence line.
  • Eliot Spitzer — governor, 2006. Over 190,661 on the line, which locked in Row C for another four years.
  • Timothy P. Gordon — the party’s first and only member elected to the State Assembly, 2006. An assemblyman on a third line is roughly as far as a New York minor party gets on its own.
  • John McCain — president, 2008. 163,973 on the line.
  • Andrew Cuomo — governor, 2010 (under 140,000 on the line, which dropped the party to Row E) and 2018 (68,713).
  • Gary Johnson — president, 2016, cross-endorsed with the Libertarian Party. The party picked him over Donald Trump, who had himself been a Reform Party candidate in New York in 2000.
  • Brock Pierce — president, 2020. Roughly 17,600 votes, and the end of the line.

The trend in that list is the whole story: 190,661 in 2006, under 140,000 in 2010, under 80,000 in 2014, 68,713 in 2018, 17,600 in 2020. Each drop cost the party a ballot position — Row C, then Row E behind the Conservative and Working Families parties, then Row F behind the Greens.

Party registration: the 400,000 registered voters who may not have meant it

At its peak the Independence Party had more than 400,000 enrolled voters statewide, which made it by far New York’s largest minor party — bigger than the Conservative, Working Families, Green and Libertarian parties. Statewide enrollment was still 483,870 in 2020; it fell to 322,070 by 2022 and about 300,653 by 2024, after the line was gone.

There is a persistent and well-documented problem with that number. A large share of those registrations are believed to have been accidental: New Yorkers filling out a voter registration form, looking for a way to say they had no party, and ticking the box marked “Independence.” Elected officials, candidates and election administrators had said so for years — that the party’s enrollment was inflated by people who meant to register as blanks, with no party affiliation at all.

Turnout is where that suspicion becomes hard to argue with. Set the enrollment against the votes the party’s own ballot line actually drew:

Year Votes on the Independence line
2006 — Spitzer, governor over 190,661
2010 — Cuomo, governor under 140,000
2014 — governor under 80,000
2018 — Cuomo, governor 68,713
2020 — Pierce, president ~17,600

Enrollment held up while the line’s vote collapsed. In 2020 the party had 483,870 registered voters in New York and drew roughly 17,600 votes on its own ballot line — about 4% of its own enrolled membership. A party whose members overwhelmingly decline to vote for it is not obviously a party. It is closer to a mailing list assembled by a checkbox.

This matters for reading every number in this article. Party registration is not the same as turnout, and turnout on a ballot line is not the same as support for the party: a voter who picks Bloomberg on Row C may be endorsing the Independence Party, may be a registered Republican who dislikes the GOP label, or may simply have found his name there first. Fusion voting makes the line’s total a real measure of leverage and a poor measure of belief.

It matters for the reform argument too. Those hundreds of thousands of people were trying to say they had no party. New York’s closed primary is precisely the rule that punishes them for it.

How the money worked: campaign finance, expenditure and a $1.1 million theft

A minor party in New York has no meaningful membership dues and no public financing of its own. Its assets are its ballot line and its petitioning capacity, and it converts them into money by selling services — ballot security, poll watchers, phone banks — to campaigns that want the line.

The Independence Party’s finances are unusually well documented, because a lot of them ended up in court filings:

  • $5,000 payments to four of the five New York City county organizations around the 2001 endorsement.
  • An $8.7 million bond approved by the Bloomberg administration in 2002 for a youth charity controlled by Newman and Fulani — widely read in the press as a reward for the line.
  • $250,000 from Bloomberg in 2005 to fund the party’s phone banks.
  • $1.1 million routed from Bloomberg’s 2009 campaign to the state Independence Party, earmarked for an Election Day poll-watching operation.

That last expenditure became the party’s most public humiliation. The operative who was to run the operation, John Haggerty, spent roughly $32,000 of it on poll watching and used most of the remainder to buy a house. He was convicted in 2011 of second-degree grand larceny and money laundering and sentenced to one and a third to four years; Bloomberg testified at the trial. In February 2011, while the investigation was live, the party’s assets were frozen.

It is worth being precise about which body received what: the $1.1 million went to the state Independence Party, not the city organizations, who by then had been at war with the state committee for five years.

The split over Fulani, and the fight for the county committees

An honest account cannot skip this part, and most of the press coverage that still cites the party exists because of it.

In September 2005 the state executive committee voted to remove Fulani and the Newman faction from the party’s leadership. Roughly three-quarters of state committee members backed the removal. The stated cause was her refusal to disavow a 1989 statement describing Jews as “mass murderers of people of color.” In 2006 the state committee went further and dissolved the Brooklyn, Queens and Bronx organizations outright, its resolution naming “antisemitism and racism espoused by Fulani and Newman.”

The city organizations fought back and partly won. State chairman Frank MacKay had abolished local control of nominations everywhere else in New York; the Court of Appeals upheld the right of the five New York City county committees to approve citywide candidates seeking their line. That ruling is why an organization the state committee had voted out of existence went on publishing, endorsing and petitioning until 2019.

In December 2012 the Daily News ran an editorial series alleging the city’s county committees had been assembled through “deceptions perpetrated on the electoral process” — seats filled by people who had not knowingly agreed to hold them. Stewart’s published response argued that the committees were “the sole vehicle for local control of the affairs of the New York City Independence Party,” and pointed at a twenty-year record of campaigning for reforms that would have dissolved the party’s own advantage. Both documents are still on the record, which is more than most minor-party fights leave behind.

How the party lost its ballot line — and then its name

What finally killed the Independence Party was not the scandal. It was arithmetic.

For decades a minor party kept its ballot status by taking 50,000 votes in the governor’s race every four years. In 2019, on the recommendation of a state commission convened to design public campaign financing, the legislature raised the bar to 130,000 votes or 2% of the total cast, whichever is higher — in both gubernatorial and presidential years, meaning every two years instead of every four. Andrew Cuomo signed it. Minor parties across the spectrum said openly that it was built to eliminate most of them.

It did. In 2020 Brock Pierce drew roughly 17,600 votes on the Independence line against a 130,000 threshold. The line was gone. In 2022 Lee Zeldin’s campaign tried to revive it by petition during his run against Kathy Hochul, and was refused after election officials found more than 12,000 invalid signatures.

Then the last turn. In December 2022 New York moved to prohibit the words “independence” and “independent” in the names of political parties, on the grounds that the party names were misleading voters into enrolling when they meant to register as unaffiliated. The party that spent thirty years arguing that parties should count for less was legislated out of its own name — and cannot return under it even if it could gather the signatures.

How you get on a New York City ballot now: petitions and independent candidates

The practical question the party’s old website used to answer — how do I run, how do I join — has a different answer now, and it is worth stating plainly: you cannot join the Independence Party of New York City. It does not exist. There is no county committee to be seated on and no line to petition for.

What remains is the ordinary machinery, which is more open than most people assume:

  • Running as an independent candidate. Anyone can get on the general election ballot in New York City by independent nominating petition, without any party. The signature caps set by the City Charter are 3,750 for mayor, comptroller or public advocate; 2,000 for borough president; and 450 for a city council seat. Those are real numbers — a council run needs 450 signatures, not a party.
  • Running in a primary election requires enrollment in that party, which is the whole complaint.
  • Checking your own enrollment. If you registered years ago and are not certain what you ticked, the Board of Elections lets you look it up — and if you are one of the New Yorkers who joined a party by accident, this is the box that decides whether you can vote in June.
  • The successor organizations. Open Primaries and Independent Voting carry the argument now, and charter commission hearings take public testimony.

The argument is back before the city: open primaries in 2026

The organization is gone. The operation is not. Cathy Stewart, the citywide coordinator who wrote that 2012 rebuttal, now works with Open Primaries and Independent Voting — and those groups are the ones filing testimony today.

In July 2025 Eric Adams’s Charter Revision Commission considered putting open primaries on the November ballot and decided against it. Its chair, Richard Buery, said he was “personally disappointed” but that there was no clear consensus on how to do it. Citizens Union called the decision a lost opportunity for New York. Common Cause/NY commended the commission for not rushing a question onto the ballot. Both are defensible positions, which is roughly the problem.

A year later the question moved to Mayor Mamdani’s Commission on Government Efficiency, where advocates testified in June 2026 asking the panel to study it. They have not settled on a model. The versions in circulation run from a fully open primary to a top-two system with party labels printed on the ballot and ranked-choice voting deciding who advances.

Whatever becomes of it, the shape of the argument has not moved since 1994, and neither have the numbers underneath it. Over a million enrolled New Yorkers, in a city where the primary is usually the whole election, still cannot vote in one. There is no longer a party sitting on Row C to make that case. There is just the case.

Sources

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