Election Reform

Partisan control of local elections, closed primaries, a lack of ranked choice voting, and uncompetitive districts mean most officials are chosen by a tiny fraction of the electorate.

Open Primaries

Allow all voters, regardless of party affiliation, to vote in primary elections. This gives every resident an equal say in choosing candidates who will appear on the general ballot, reducing the control of party insiders and encouraging broader voter participation.

Ranked Choice Voting (RCV)

Keep or expand RCV for all city offices to promote consensus candidates and reduce polarization. By ranking candidates in order of preference, voters can support their true preferred candidate without fear of “wasting” their vote, helping ensure winners have authentic broad support.

Nonpartisan Local Elections

Remove party labels for local offices to encourage voting based on policy over party identity. This shifts the focus to candidate qualifications and issue positions, rather than partisan loyalty or broader concerns like geopolitics, which are irrelevant at the local level. It lowers polarization and prioritizes practical solutions to real issues like housing, schools, and public safety. City officials deal with grounded, everyday challenges, so decisions should be about what works, not partisan labels. National party politics have no place at the local level; figuring out how to make sure the trash gets picked up every week is not party-specific.

Constitutional & Civil Liberties Protections at the Local Level

Free Speech Safeguards

Enact local ordinances to protect speech, assembly, and press freedoms within city jurisdiction. While the First Amendment applies nationally, NYC can strengthen these protections locally, ensuring city agencies and officials cannot overreach or suppress lawful civic expression.

Due Process Safeguards

Strengthen local policies ensuring fair hearings, transparent enforcement, and public defenders in municipal matters. This would safeguard residents from arbitrary or biased local decisions by guaranteeing consistent procedures, public access to proceedings, and representation when rights are at stake.

Government EFFICIENCY AND SYSTEM COHERENCE

Agency Consolidation INTO SINGLE PERMANENT CITIZENS’ ASSEMBLY

Merge redundant city agencies and positions, starting with the 59 Community Boards, 5 Borough Boards, 5 Borough Presidents, and the City Planning Commission (CPC), into permanent Citizens’ Assemblies. Our restructuring would cut red tape, reduce overhead, and speed up timelines for critical projects like housing development and more by replacing fragmented bureaucracies with a single, citizen-led approval process.

NYC has dozens of agencies with overlapping mandates in housing, transportation, sanitation, and economic development. This creates duplication, delays, contradictory policies, and a broader system incoherence that slows progress and erodes public trust.

Education Accountability & Reform

Reallocate existing NYC school funds, which are already the highest per-student spending in the nation, toward proven, results-driven programs rather than administrative bloat. Modeled after Boston’s successful structuring, this would prioritize education curriculum quality, student experience, ending the existing corruption within the NYC education system, and transparent performance tracking over endlessly throwing more money at the system.

Citizens’ Assemblies could oversee spending priorities and performance audits to ensure accountability and high-quality education for all New York children.

Housing INCENTIVES & REFORM

Remove outdated and unnecessary regulations that drive up costs and slow construction (e.g. mandatory parking minimums for new builds…) and streamline the inefficient and lengthy approvals process. By aligning incentives for developers to create moderate and affordable housing, and letting Citizens’ Assemblies replace duplicative approval bodies, NYC can expand housing supply. Increasing housing supply creates more competition, which drives prices down for New Yorkers.

Similarly, NYC’s zoning text is over 4,000 pages and riddled with contradictory overlays. A zoning code simplification could cut decades of disconnected and fragmented rules: a single reform with massive downstream effects on affordability and livability.

University Fair Share Contribution

Require universities in NYC to pay local property taxes or equivalent community impact fees, ending blanket tax exemptions that strain the city budget and place extra burdens on citizens. City universities have taken advantage of their tax-free exemption.

Currently, tax-exempt universities own significant parts of our city but contribute little to local coffers. For example, NYU controls 1.9% of all built area in Manhattan, and Columbia alone sits on nearly $4 billion worth of real estate—none of which pays property taxes. Local citizens have to pick up that burden for each square foot of university real estate in the city not paying taxes. These unused revenues could be reinvested into housing, education, infrastructure, and more, directed by Citizens’ Assemblies.

AI and technocracy SAFEGUARDS & Privacy

Artificial intelligence is advancing faster than our ability to govern it and its potential to cloud human morality, concentrate power into a technocracy, and bypass oversight poses a serious threat to democracy. Yet, our political institutions remain largely disengaged, leaving a dangerous gap where AI could quietly erode the very values and safeguards democracy and freedoms depend on.

Citizens’ Assemblies help maintain a citizen-led decision process so democratic control and structures remain even in an uncertain and ever-changing future.

AI Decision Safeguards

Require that final authority for major city decisions rests with human, citizen-led bodies (via CAs, for example), even if AI is used for analysis. This ensures that governance remains democratically accountable, preventing automated systems from making binding policy choices without human judgment grounded in community values.

Algorithm Transparency

Mandate public disclosure of AI systems used in city services, including data sources and biases. Open documentation allows residents to understand how decisions are being shaped, identify potential discrimination or errors, and hold agencies accountable for technological impacts.

AI Privacy Standards

Limit the collection, storage, and use of residents’ personal data by city systems; ensure opt-outs where possible. Clear rules protect civil liberties, reduce the risk of surveillance creep, and align local governance with the highest ethical standards for digital privacy.

CULTURAL ADVOCACY

Countering Populism & Polarization WITH SOLUTIONS & COHERENCE

The global rise of populism fuels an us vs. them rhetoric that deepens polarization, breeds extremism, and paves the road toward authoritarianism. Populism is seductive because it emotionally taps into very real hardships people face, hijacking the amygdala and triggering fear-based trauma responses in the brain, which default to black-and-white thinking and bypass the rational problem-solving needed for coherent solutions. Polarization and dehumanizing other groups have never ended in unity or progress: only mass chaos at best, and outright moral catastrophe at worst. Protecting and/or creating real democracy begins at the cultural level and this means actively resisting these patterns and fostering dialogue, empathy, shared civic purpose, and, ultimately, real solutions to complex challenges.

Transparent, peer- and community-led decision-making (permanent Citizens’ Assemblies, our priority initiative!) will help restore trust in public institutions, which is critical as confidence and civility reach historic lows, making solutions and coherence possible.

American Transcendentalism reminds us that democracy thrives when individuals trust their own conscience and see themselves as part of a greater whole.

A city for and by the people.