New York City local politics is broken. And I'm not just saying that because I lost in my race to be one of my neighborhood's party representatives. The more I found out about the particular post and the overall structure of the party system, the less I wanted to win.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg argues that party-based elections limit political participation of a wider range of citizens whose voices are squelched by party regulars. As an alternative, the mayor is pushing a plan for non-partisan city-wide elections.

Mayor Bloomberg is right in saying that the current process is overly exclusionary, but his solution is wrong. His plan for mayoral elections is sort of like shaving off the top bit of a huge iceberg and declaring the problem solved-full steam ahead!

But parties are not the real problem, nor is the mayoral general election; machine politics are. If we really want to fix New York politics, then we need to do two things: Make it easier to get on the ballot and streamline the complexity of the political system.

First and foremost, we need to lower the barriers to entry. In order to get on this past Tuesday's ballot, the winning candidate for female district leader in my neighborhood, Keen Berger, needed almost 10 times as many signatures as did Arnold Schwarzenegger for the governorship of California Berger didn't have to shell out a $3,500 filing fee like Schwarzenegger did, but she did have to round up 500 signers, compared with his 65. Something is not right here. We are keeping local talent out of politics by creating unnecessarily high barriers to entry.

Second, we should eliminate the role of the district leaders, county committees and the judicial delegates. These positions range from irrelevant to borderline-corrupt. District leaders are the old-time ward bosses. They once served as the conduit between the public and local elected officials. But today, nobody goes through them; they just pick up the phone and call their city councilperson or state-level representative. (The only remaining formal role of district leaders is to hand out polling jobs on Election Day.)

The time and money spent on the campaigns for these irrelevant positions could be better spent on more consequential political fights if we simply eliminated them. In the battle to elect Berger to an unpaid party position, for instance, the campaigns of the three candidates spent an estimated $100,000 or more. Those donations could have been better spent, for example, funding the Greenwich Village Senior Center that had its budget slashed this year with the state fiscal crisis.

Ditto for judicial delegates. Judicial delegates largely act as the rubber stamps of elected officials when selecting judges. This has led to some disasters on the bench. Expert nominating panels, direct election or even lotteries would provide better alternatives.

The role of each party's county committee is to select replacement candidates for elected officials who die while in office. In counties that are heavily slanted toward one party or another, this prerogative boils down to anointing the successor. Why not eliminate this whole system of patronage and adopt primaries for special elections so that the people themselves can choose successors?

If the parties were "downsized" in these ways, a lot of political will (and money) could be redirected to more meaningful causes. I, myself, was on the ballot for two largely irrelevant positions: county committee and alternate judicial delegate. While I found it really cool to see my name translated into Chinese characters for the Chinatown election districts, there have to be better ways for politically active citizens to direct their energies than run for election basically as human rubber-stamps.

Established political clubs will fight these kinds of reforms tooth and nail, since their power stems from the complexity of the current system. For example, if someone wanted to run for City Council as a Democrat, it would be almost impossible do it without gaining the endorsement of one or more of the clubs. That's because she would need a sizable number of volunteers to help her gain the necessary signatures to get on the ballot. The candidate would also need the aid of an experienced election lawyer to guide her through the Byzantine process. Most clubs have someone like this who volunteers their time to stave off ballot challenges from rival clubs.

In turn, the power of the clubs stems from the endorsements they receive from local elected officials. In fact, each club gets identified with one or more incumbents in the City Council or State Legislature. It becomes a forward-feeding cycle that keeps outsiders out. In fact, in this Democratic city, it is much easier to run for office as a maverick Republican, since there isn't the same kind of arcane party machinery (yet) in the New York City branch of the Grand Old Party. Just ask Mayor Bloomberg.

Reforming the balloting process and streamlining the party structures would go a long way to making local politics less like Tammany Hall and more like 21st century participatory democracy. I lost in my bid for county committee; what a relief not to have to participate in a system with which I have become disillusioned. I don't yet know the outcome of the judicial delegate contest, but maybe I'll get lucky and lose that one, too, and be spared the constant lobbying by would-be-judges that has been clogging my mailbox. When this is all over, maybe Democrats can focus on larger issues that really matter-both locally and nationally.