There are at least three reasons why every New Yorker should care who becomes the next district attorney of Albany County. To begin with, the front-runner, David Soares, is promising to be lenient with low-level drug criminals, a decidedly unorthodox platform for someone seeking a law-enforcement post. Supporters say his upset win in the Democratic primary, over a traditional tough-on-crime incumbent, will strengthen the campaign to roll back New York’s stringent Rockefeller-era drug laws.

Secondly, there is the manner in which Mr. Soares defeated the current D.A., Paul Clyne. The union-backed Working Families Party spent tens of thousands of dollars in support of Mr. Soares during the Democratic primary, including $81,500 it received from a group founded by the billionaire philanthropist George Soros. If these tactics stand up in court, they will weaken the rules meant to insulate party primaries from outside influence.

Finally, the Albany County district attorney has jurisdiction over the seat of state government, enabling him to wield prosecutorial power over the Legislature, the governor’s office, and the headquarters of almost every state agency.

Previous occupants of the office have taken a hands-off approach to corruption at the Capitol. But if the voters of Albany County elect Mr. Soares, they would be installing a maverick as the sheriff of State Street.

A few well-placed subpoenas would probably do more to change the status quo at Albany than any of the reform proposals floated by legislators and good-government groups over the past year.

“The morning after the election, everyone in the permanent government woke up and said, ‘Uh oh, we’ve got a problem. This guy isn’t in on the deal,'” Senator Eric Schneiderman, a Democrat of Manhattan, said of Mr. Soares’s primary victory. “He’s a big threat to the interlocking directorate of lobbyists, bureaucrats, and elected officials.”

The legislative director of the New York Public Interest Research Group, Blair Horner, said he finds it intriguing that officials of the Republican, Independence, and Conservative parties are supporting a lawsuit by the Clyne campaign charging that the Soares campaign violated election laws.

“It does make me wonder what’s really going on,” Mr. Horner said. “Has the prospect of an independent D.A. sent belated shockwaves through the political establishment?”

Mr. Soares does not shy away from the role of Capitol watchdog. “We can’t expect an 18-year-old on the street corner to respect the law if the people who make the laws and enforce the laws aren’t held accountable,” he said in an interview with The New York Sun. “We’re going to prosecute all offenses occurring in Albany County.”

This would be a dramatic departure from the pattern set by the district attorney from 1975 to 2000, Sol Greenberg, who declared he was too busy going after violent street crime to worry about political misdemeanors.

Mr. Clyne has broken with this tradition in at least two cases. He prosecuted an assemblyman from Brooklyn, Roger Green, for padding his expense account, and a former Assembly counsel, Michael Boxley, for sexual misconduct with a legislative aide.

Still, Mr. Clyne has never quite lived down the way he took office four years ago. The leaders of Albany County’s dominant Democratic Party handpicked him to become district attorney after the abrupt resignation of Mr. Greenberg in September 2000 – just late enough to head off a party primary.

Mr. Soares has certainly established his independence from what remains of Albany’s Democratic machine. His credibility as a political reformer could suffer, however, if the courts uphold the lawsuit against his campaign.

The suit brought by representatives of the Clyne campaign and the Republican, Independence, and Conservative parties argues that the Working Families Party violated a law that prohibits parties from spending money on primary elections. They also charge that $81,500 in donations to the campaign from the Drug Policy Alliance Network, a group founded by Mr. Soros, exceeded the $5,000 cap on corporate contributions.

“Never before, at least in my experience in New York State, has such a conscious, orchestrated, two-tiered scheme to evade the contribution limits of the election law ever been devised, let alone successfully executed,” said an attorney for the Clyne campaign, James Featherstonhaugh.

Assemblyman Richard Brodsky of Westchester County, who is representing the Working Families Party in the case, argued that the party was simply exercising its constitutional right to campaign for the candidate of its choice.

“For someone to argue that election law does not allow a political party to support its own candidate in a general election because there’s a primary in another party doesn’t make a lot of sense,” Mr. Brodsky said.

He said contributions from the Drug Policy Alliance Network were at most a technical violation that will be cleared up when the group files its paperwork to become a political action committee in New York.

The only outrage in this case, Mr. Brodsky said, is that the anti-Soares forces managed to obtain a court order that shut down his campaign for four days after the primary. “This was about stopping the Soares campaign,” he said. “It was not about the technicalities of the election law.”

Mr. Featherstonhaugh said more is at stake than technicalities. He said the Working Families Party targeted its mailings and phone calls to Democratic voters, included the date of the primary in its literature, and criticized Mr. Clyne without ever mentioning the Republican candidate, Roger Cusick.

“You can make an argument that there shouldn’t be any elections laws if you want to,” Mr. Featherstonhaugh said. “That would be the ultimate in free speech. But in fact that’s not the way we do it. There are rules, and there are penalties for violating the rules.”