As New Yorkers get ready to sort out the agenda of Mayor Bloomberg’s Charter Revision Commission, some of us are puzzling over the logic of selecting nine of its 11 members from the Democrats and only two from the Republicans. It means that the the body charged with proposing to New York City’s voters a “non-partisan” election scheme — for electing the city’s mayor, public advocate, borough presidents, and City Council — is hopelessly skewed toward one side of the political spectrum.

No doubt some of the pols will pipe up that the ratio on the commission is not terribly far out of sync with the city’s overall partisan break down, in which Democrats outnumber Republicans five to one. But the figure gives pause to those in the conservative political minority who see a political party as one of the traditional institutions for aggregating their resources. Eliminating the party primaries, and replacing them with a tworound election system where parties would be excluded from the ballot, does not strike all of us as an idea that will make New York’s politics more competitive.

The commission knows this is a hot question. Its spokesman certainly went on the defensive when asked by The New York Sun about the issue of the commissioners’ party registrations. “We don’t keep political affiliations of the commissioners…It wouldn’t be appropriate,” the spokesman, Paul Elliott, told us. Apparently, the commission sees this question as “cynical,” “irrelevant,” and moreover “disgusting.” Nonetheless, New Yorkers might want to know who is looking out for the interests of Republicans in this process.

Is it the executive director of the commission, Alan Gartner? He is not one of the 11 members, but oversees the technical work. It turns out that he is an on and off Democrat who is the editor of books such as “A Full Employment Program for the 1970s” and “What Reagan Is Doing To Us.” The latter, copyright 1982, in a preface signed by Mr. Gartner and two others, calls Reagan’s economic program “the more mean-spirited for its hypocrisy.” Is the protector of the Republicans the commission’s chairman, Frank Macchiarola? Mr. Macchiarola is a longtime Brooklyn Democrat and was schools chancellor under Mayor Koch. Is it commission member William Lynch Jr., a Dinkins deputy mayor? Is it the sometimes contributor to these pages, the distinguished New Democrat theorist Fred Siegel, a commission member?

While these Democrats, many of them seasoned pros in city politics, are diligently working to mend perceived problems in our electoral system, they are balanced only by Kathryn Patterson, a former partner of the Coudert Brothers law firm, and Mohammed Khalid, a Staten Island dentist active in local politics. These two Republicans, it should be noted, sided with the majority of the commission in voting to put non-partisan elections on the ballot this fall. So the question still lingers as to why Mr. Bloomberg, a Democrat turned Republican, appointed such a lopsided commission in the first place.

In this light, the constant talk among the commissioners about ending the Democratic monopoly in Gotham suddenly starts to appear in a new light. The fact is that this entire process has been monopolized by Democrats. The mayor apparently thought that if he wanted to get a rubber stamp on his idea he couldn’t risk having too many Republicans around. Or could it be that the Republicans and Conservatives don’t quite see their interests as being what the Democratic Charter Revision Commission says their interests should be.

One who is starting to take a skeptical view is the head of New York’s Conservative Party, Michael Long. He told us he thinks the mayor has a “right to appoint who he wants.” But Mr. Long is not dumb. He also sees clearly one of the main problems with non-partisan elections — that most general elections will be reduced to “two Democrats running at each other.” Or, as he put it: “The general election will be like a primary.”That doesn’t sound like a more competitive system to us.