“When aroused voters make up their collective mind to do a job they do it emphatically. Yesterday they were determined to throw that un-American monstrosity, Proportional Representation, out the window. They had been patient with it for ten years. They had been willing to give it more than a fair trial. But at last they had grown weary of its confusions in the election of members of the City Council, of the disproportionate representation of radicals and left wingers, which P.R. made possible. So they rejected it with an overwhelming majority of which Queens alone supplied almost half.”

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Those were the words with which The New York Sun celebrated, on November 5, 1947, the end of one of the most infamous attempts of the reformers to make an end-run around the traditional two-party system in America. The main result of proportional representation was to seat in the city council two members of a communist party that took direction from the Soviet Union. Even the New York Times admitted its error in backing the experiment. Proportional Representation was a classic case of do-goodism that did bad.

On November 4, New Yorkers will have a chance to avoid the same kind of folly when they are asked whether to give up their right to act through political parities in the city elections. The idea of non-partisan elections sounds good in theory. It has the support of a number of people we respect enormously, including the political sage Fred Siegel, our own columnist, J.P. “Fipp” Avlon, and our mayor, who doesn’t need a political party to aggregate resources for his political campaigns. Hizzoner has staked much of his reputation on this measure and is spending liberally to gain its passage.

In the end, we’re unconvinced. Non-partisan elections are not proportional representation, which was a completely different scheme. But the banning of political parties from the city ballot has a similar goal, to finagle the system in an effort to maneuver voters into electing different candidates than the ones they’ve been electing. On its face the idea strikes us as both fishy and foul. It does exactly the opposite of what ought to be done in this city, increase the ability the ordinary men and women who pay the taxes and work in the city to aggregate their resources through the party system. Despite all the rhetoric by backers of non-partisan elections, this feature of the proposed charter reform impedes public participation.

And worse, it is a dodge against the real problems in the city, which are a bloated city government, confiscatory taxes, failing schools. The whole charter reform effort has been a diversion. They city doesn’t need a debate about process, it doesn’t need fiddling with the process. It needs a debate about the fundamental ideas. Neither party, in our view, has done a particularly good job at this; the Republican Party has taken a particularly appalling powder. But we just don’t see the logic of banning political parties from the ballot. To do so holds the possibility for great mischief by sidelining a party system that has delivered voters a clear choice, for better or worse, in the voting booth.