NEW YORK — Former New York City Mayor Eric Adams, channeling his inner Kevin McCallister, rigged City Hall in the waning days of his term with a maze of governmental booby traps primed to stymie his successor, Zohran Mamdani.
Most of those efforts failed through a combination of bad timing, limits on Adams’ power and general ham-fistedness. But the former mayor managed to lay one tripwire so consequential that it has triggered weeks of legal and political scrambling — and raised questions about whether it can be disarmed at all.
Hours before Adams left office on Dec. 31, the lame-duck mayor established a legally protected commission packed predominately with loyalists and tasked with exploring a ballot question about open primaries, a proposed change in the city’s electoral machinery that, if implemented, would make it more difficult for Mamdani, a democratic socialist, to win a second term…