Testimony to Mayoral Charter: New Data on Age, Race, Sex of NYC Unaffiliated Voters

Thank you for accommodating our request to again comment remotely during these final days of the state legislative session. Reinvent Albany advocates for transparent, accountable New York government and fact-based public policy. Our staff experts have drafted and passed dozens of city and state bills, and are frequently called upon by journalists and elected officials. 

This Commission’s preliminary staff report emphasized long-standing concerns about very low voter turnout and noted that 1 million NYC voters are unaffiliated and cannot vote in party primaries. (Please note that New Yorkers enrolled using Automatic Voter Registration (AVR) are unaffiliated and it is up to them to contact their local BOE and enroll in a party.) 

Today, Reinvent Albany is sharing Professor John Mollenkopf’s new estimate of the party affiliation of New York City voters by age, sex and racial group, which he calculated at our request. Professor Mollenkopf, the Director of the Center for Urban Research at the CUNY Graduate Center, based his estimate on data from voter rolls and the American Community Survey, and will produce an update using more sophisticated statistical methods later in 2025. A detailed description of Mollenkopf’s methodology and sources are in this written testimony. 

We encourage the Commission and public to draw their own conclusions from Professor Mollenkopf’s data, but Reinvent Albany will highlight the following:

1. Regardless of sex or race, younger voters are significantly more likely to be unaffiliated with a political party than older voters. 
2. Black 18-29 year-olds are more likely (27.3%) than white 18-29 year-olds (25.5%) to be unaffiliated.
3. Men are more likely to be unaffiliated than women, with Asian men least likely to be in a party followed by white, Hispanic and Black men. 
4. Young women are more likely than older women to be unaffiliated. 
5. Far more voters aged 18-29 are unaffiliated than age 70-79 and this gap varies widely by race (see chart below). By far the biggest difference is between young and older Black voters. The portion of 18-29 Black male voters that are unaffiliated is 294% higher than 70-79 year-old Black voters; the portion of 18-29 Black female voters that are unaffiliated is 318% higher than 70-79 year-old Black female voters. By comparison, for whites, unaffiliated younger male voters are  78% higher and younger females 67% higher.

Reinvent Albany Recommendations for Open Primary 

Given NYC’s very poor voter turnout and what we believe is a clear trend towards new voters choosing to be unaffiliated from a political party, we strongly support major changes in the NYC voting process. However, we are very mindful that Ranked Choice Voting passed in New York City because there was plenty of time for extensive community outreach, education, and consultation. More public outreach and consensus building reduces political risk and is fundamental. 

In an ideal world, we would choose a “Vote Once” system like San Francisco’s that holds one Ranked Choice Voting election in November and has no primary. However, we believe doing that in New York City would require state legislation, which we do not see as politically viable. 

Reinvent Albany recommends the Commission consider these four options for improving voter turnout and empowering unaffiliated voters: 

1. Even-Year Elections, which would vastly increase voter turnout in local elections. 
2. Semi-Open Primary in which unaffiliated voters can vote in the party primary of their choice. Involves the fewest and simplest changes for voters and the political system to absorb and is the least politically difficult, while offering substantial benefits. 
3. Top Four RCV General Election for citywide offices based on RCV open primary. Others are describing benefits of this approach, which is used in Alaska. 
4. Top Two General Election based on RCV open primary. We believe this is clearly superior to the status quo, but not as good as Top Four because it will be as politically difficult to pass, without all of the benefits. We are concerned that winnowing to two intensifies the power of Independent Expenditures funded by special interests.

Reference

Sources and Methodology

Sources
Voter registration file, NYC Board of Elections February 2025 (for age, gender, party) and American Community Survey 2018-2023 (for racial composition of voting age population at the block group level)

Professor Mollenkopf’s Methodology
Using the age cohorts used by the NYC Campaign Finance Board, Mollenkopf categorized all voters’ races based on the plurality racial group among the voting age citizens at the block group level. 

Where group shares tied, Mollenkopf allocated the block group plurality racial group using the 2020 Census count of VAP by race at the block level for the blocks on which the voters resided. This is imprecise, since block groups’ CVAP is not 100 percent racially segregated. However, Mollenkopf believes the various errors offset each other and the overall estimate is close to the truth.

Click here to view the testimony as a PDF.