Healthy Vacancies

Bill Perkins’ election to the City Council in last week’s special election leaves his former state Senate seat vacant, quite possibly for some time. Gov. Cuomo is unlikely to call an immediate special election to fill the seat, and his reasons are pretty sound.

The same reasons clearly apply in the case of the Assembly seat left vacant last month when Joseph Saladino quit the Legislature to become an Oyster Bay supervisor.

Asked recently when he plans to call “specials” for the vacant seats, Cuomo promised only to “have an answer shortly.”

State law gives the gov wide discretion on setting special elections to replace lawmakers who quit, die or are removed from office. In his six years, Cuomo’s handled all three scenarios — and generally preferred to set dates when the polls were going to open anyway, rather than call a vote sooner for just the single office.

Part of it is expense: Why impose the added outlays on the local Board of Elections? It costs as much to open and run the polling places no matter how low the turnout — and turnout for specials is always low.

Moreover, that last factor almost guarantees that party regulars, political hacks and other small-but-well-organized types will dominate the vote. If the turnout isn’t low, by contrast, a vacant seat provides the best chance for a candidate outside the political establishment to win office in the Legislature.

So Cuomo tends to set “specials” on another voting day — calling four of them on April 19 last year, the day of New York’s presidential primaries.

The only real argument against the governor’s approach is that a vacancy leaves citizens in that district unrepresented in the Senate or Assembly during the hiatus. Yet (barring a rare double departure in overlapping districts) they still have a representative in the Legislature. And, again, a machine-empowering special isn’t so democratic, either.

A purist might fault Perkins and Saladino for abandoning those constituents, but the truth is that leaving their seats empty doesn’t really change all that much — even in budget-making season. Neither man was in the majority in his chamber.

In the Senate, the mainline Democrats are a largely impotent bunch; it’s the Republicans and Independent Democrats who call the shots. In the Assembly, Republicans are such a minority that they mainly succeed by floating a good idea and then getting Democrats to take credit for it.

And, given the gerrymandering of New York legislative districts, the odds are heavy that whoever winds up winning each seat will be from the same party as before.

Cuomo has it right: Leaving these seats open for months won’t harm a thing.