It may be hard for many New Yorkers to believe but in the recent election, Washington, D.C. offered an important lesson for New York in how to improve democracy. Think here not of the incoming Trump administration but of a change in local government in the District of Columbia. There, over the objections of the D.C. Democratic Party, voters adopted an “open primary” ballot initiative — to permit independent voters (neither Ds or Rs) to vote in party primaries, where, as in New York, the most important candidate decisions are so often made. Initiative 83 will permit “any voter who is not registered with a political party to vote in the primary election of that voter’s choosing.”  This is not unusual across the country, including in such crucial primary states as New Hampshire. But it differs sharply from the outdated law in New York City, where low turnout Democratic primaries typically determine who will serve as mayor (see de Blasio, Bill), despite the fact that 20% of voters are not registered by political party (924,000 of 4.5 million registered voters). The situation mirrors that of D.C., where 17% of voters are independents. The major difference: Washington voters decided that it’s undemocratic to disenfranchise those voters wishing to vote in a primary election in a city where 76% of voters are Democratic — and where that party’s primary, as in Gotham, decides who will be mayor. De Blasio won the key 2013 Democratic primary with just 260,000 votes.  For those who would like New York to follow the D.C. example, however, there’s an important difference between the two cities as relates to the “citizen initiative” process — what it takes to get a ballot proposal before the voters. In D.C., a petition signed by 5% of voters and brought to the local Board of Elections, automatically gets on the ballot. New York’s signature requirement is not onerous (30,000 voter signatures) but the proposal then goes to the City Council, which may or may not choose to put it on the ballot, or to substitute its own version of the proposal to compete with the citizen initiative, which can be pushed back to an off-year, low turnout election.  Needless to say, Democratic incumbents here are not likely to welcome non-party voters to their low turnout primaries. Indeed, that’s exactly what happened in 2003, when then-Mayor Mike Bloomberg, elected as an Republican, used his power as mayor to convene a Charter Commission to put the open primary reform on the ballot. As John Opdycke of the national group Open Primaries puts it, “every Democratic and Republican clubhouse came out against us. We were crushed.” Not even Bloomberg millions could sway the outcome. There is reason to think, however, that open primary reform could prevail today. Concern about political polarization has increased dramatically since 2003; bringing independents into the primary process can force candidates to appeal to less extreme voters and special interest groups — instead, to the so-called “median voter.” Concern about making every vote count has become a widely-shared goal. What’s more, there’s a precedent in New York City. Billionaire philanthropist Ronald Lauder’s New Yorkers for Term Limits succeeded, at great expense, in 1993, to limiting local elected officials to two four-year terms. This was no minor change in city politics. Lauder, wrote the New York Times, “has mounted a campaign that has shaken the foundations of the city’s political establishment.” Three years later, Lauder’s group held off a Council bid to extend the limit to three terms. Paging Mr. Lauder: it’s time to consider a similar campaign to open primary elections.  It’s worth noting that, outside D.C., open primary ballot initiatives did not succeed elsewhere; they were turned back in Colorado, Nevada, Idaho, Montana, South Dakota and Arizona. In all, however, the change was paired with the adoption of ranked choice voting, considered by many to be confusing and the main focus of the initiative campaigns (as it was in D.C.). After the D.C. vote, New York City remains the only ranked choice voting jurisdiction that does not also have open primary elections. Democrats like to denounce other jurisdictions — notably, Georgia, another open primary state — for alleged Jim Crow practices. Yet, thanks to the close primary system, New York City and New York State, have what Open Primaries’ Opdycke describes as “some of the least competitive elections in the country.” That’s the real threat to democracy. Husock is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.