New York

Fusion lets one candidate run on many party lines, with all lines summing to the candidate — but each party lives or dies by its own line's total: 130,000 votes or 2%, whichever is greater, tested at every governor and president election. A one-candidate-one-line model miscounts the race and misses the party-survival stakes underneath it.

Chapter 741 of 2023 puts towns and counties outside NYC on even-year ballots starting this November — upheld in October, cert denied in March, no charter escaped. But sheriffs, county clerks, DAs, every judge, and all three-year offices stay odd-year, and shortened transition terms stagger through 2030. One county's offices now span both calendars mid-transition.

New York City's five boroughs are five counties whose governments were absorbed in 1898 — yet each still elects a district attorney, each borough a president, and the city's sheriff has been appointed since 1942. County-shaped data with no county behind it.

533 villages sit inside towns — residents pay both, vote in both. Seventy-two villages span two towns, nine span two counties, Saranac Lake sits in three towns and two counties, five are coterminous with their towns — and 27 have dissolved since 2010, so the layer keeps shrinking.

Village elections — default the third Tuesday in March — are run by the village clerk, not the county board. School districts run their own May budget votes and board elections. Fire districts run their own December elections for five-year commissioner seats. Three whole office classes never touch the county election machinery.

Assembly and Senate both serve two-year terms — all 213 seats, every even year, no staggering anywhere. And the Senate's 63 seats exist by statute on top of a constitution that still says fifty.

New York's Supreme Court is the trial level; the top court is the Court of Appeals, which is appointed. Supreme Court justices are nominated at party judicial district conventions — no primary exists for the office — then run in November, usually cross-endorsed on fused lines.

Closed primaries with the harshest switch deadline in the family: a party change filed after February 14 waits until a week after the June primary to take effect. Affiliation is real, binding, and time-locked — the June electorate was fixed four months early.