Down with the Independence Party: a Daily News campaign in print – published on
CapitalNewYork.com – makes a few good points about the Daily News‘ investigation into the practices of New York State’s Independence Party.

• The editorial board of the Daily News has a successful past as an investigative reporting operation, having won a 1999 Pulitzer Prize. The paper is clearly gunning for prize-worthy work here with its investigation into the Independence Party’s shenanigans.
• The investigation found some of the voters who the party claimed to have registered with them, only to discover most had no idea they’d registered.
• The paper goes on to show how participation on the Independence party line in elections has at times been larger than the margin of difference in important races, raising the question of whether certain office holders owe their positions to a willingness to participate in what amounts to an electoral scam.
• Even for people who follow New York politics closely, the machinations of the freakish Independence Party are sometimes hard to take seriously, and the fact that they continue to exist and exert a degree of influence over local elections is just taken as a kind of stupid fact of life.
• The Daily News explains why they should be taken seriously, and why they shouldn’t be accepted as a fact of life.