Mayor Bloomberg’s Charter Revision Commission is going to gather this evening at St. Francis College at Brooklyn for a public meeting regarding non-partisan elections. Earlier in the day, its staff is going to meet with the press to answer critics of the idea the mayor is advancing, which is to ban political parties from the ballot in the city. It seems, as our Errol Louis reports on Page 3, that even as the pace of the commission’s work quickens, an avalanche of studies and testimony is suggesting the idea may not be such a good one after all.

The mayor and his Charter Revision Commission want to do away with the two-party system in the city. This is understandable for a mayor who jumped to the Republican Party to run for mayor before alienating much of Staten Island and Brooklyn with tax hikes and a smoking ban. It’s understandable for a mayor who made a promise to the demagogue Lenora Fulani that he would seek such a ban on political parties if her party would endorse him. But it’s a long way from understandable for the rest of the city.

One problem that will be the subject of a lot of debate between now and the election is how public financing of elections will work. We are no fans of the current system of matching funds for city candidates, but the system would become completely unworkable under a non-partisan system, where a practically unlimited number of candidates could enter a race and each claim matching funds. It would be an expensive proposition not just financially, but morally as well, as taxpayers would be forced to fund every anti-Semitic and racist crank who would long since have been sorted out by the big parties.

Non-partisan elections are also troubling to those concerned with issues of voter participation. A professor of political affairs at Baruch College, Doug Muzzio, testified to the Charter Revision Commission that while removing party names from the ballot may well reduce the influence of the two major parties, it also may reduce voter turnout overall. Cities such as Boston, Chicago, and Los Angeles have adopted non-partisan elections, but all have seen low voter turnout in recent years. Also, Mr. Muzzio has testified that turnout in nonpartisan elections may skew against those of lower socioeconomic status.

Then there is the question of exactly how voters will choose candidates in the absence of party labels in the voting booth. The small number of truly engaged voters might make their choice based on arcane policy matters. According to Mr. Muzzio, however, data show that in the absence of party affiliation, incumbency, race, and ethnicity tend to dominate. New Yorkers wanting to gain a glimpse of what they’re in for can look to California, whose recall has turned into what amounts to the greatest essentially non-partisan election of all time.

In what has passed for a debate on this so far, the mayor’s commission has adopted a condescending tone.”At the Commission’s recent hearings, 80 percent of witnesses testified in support of nonpartisan elections,” a commission staff report from June gloated. “Of those who testified in opposition, many were elected officials,” it continued. The same, of course, could be said for those who are promoting it. No one around here is against reform, but when the commission sits tonight, it will be asking for help in breaking up constitutional bedrock. It’ll need a lot better case than anyone has heard to date.