There is a basic question New York’s progressive political establishment needs to answer: How can you claim to stand for voting rights while refusing to stand up for more than 600,000 New Yorkers of color who are excluded from New York City’s primary elections?

New York City has 1.2 million independent voters. That’s almost a quarter of all voters in our city. Fifty-four percent are people of color. Yet because they are independent, they cannot vote in primary elections.

For progressives, this should be an obvious problem to solve.

The movement has spent decades fighting barriers to voting: voter ID laws, voter purges and restrictive registration rules. It has fought for early voting, mail voting, same-day and automatic registration. The principle is simple: government should make it easier for eligible citizens to participate, not harder.

But many of those same voices are willing to defend shutting more than a million New Yorkers out of........

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