The questions New York City voters have decided since the 1894 vote to create Greater New York: amendments to the State Constitution, bond acts, constitutional convention questions and City Charter questions. Each one has its own section with the result statewide, citywide, by borough and, from 2014 on, by community district.
New York City as we know it began with a ballot question. On November 6, 1894, voters in New York County, Kings County, Queens County and Richmond County, along with the City of Mount Vernon and the towns of Westchester, East Chester and Pelham, were asked whether they favored joining together as one city. The vote was advisory. The State Legislature had put it on the ballot, and only the Legislature could act on it. Every county said yes, Brooklyn by 277 votes out of more than 129,000. The Legislature then passed the consolidation, the first election for the new city was held in November 1897, and Greater New York took effect on January 1, 1898.
Cast the 1894 ballot and see how every place voted, on a map →
That order of events is the story of city power in the United States. States have their own constitutions and keep their own powers under the U.S. Constitution. Cities have neither. In Hunter v. City of Pittsburgh (1907), the U.S. Supreme Court held that cities are "political subdivisions of the state, created by it," and that a state may change their powers, redraw their borders, merge them or end them without their consent. New York City exists, with the borders and the powers it has, because New York State created it, and in that sense it exists at the pleasure of the State.
A state is different. In Texas v. White (1869), decided four years after the Civil War, the Court described "an indestructible Union, composed of indestructible States." A state cannot be dissolved by another government, and secession, the one theory under which a state would stop being a state by its own choice, has been treated as having no legal standing ever since.
That is why most of what New York City voters have decided at the ballot box is statewide. Of the 425 measures on this page, 384 were put to every voter in the state: amendments to the State Constitution, bond acts and, every 20 years, whether to call a convention to rewrite the Constitution. Many of them set how much the City could borrow, how it could tax and how far it could govern itself, among them home rule for cities in 1923 and its expansion in 1963. Only 41 were City questions, and the City can put those before voters only because State law, the Municipal Home Rule Law, allows it.
Sources: Hunter v. City of Pittsburgh, 207 U.S. 161 (1907) · Texas v. White, 74 U.S. 700 (1869) · Cameron Gordon, Scale, Scope, Efficiency and Equity in Public Service Provision: How might we analyse the 1898 Consolidation of New York City? (University of Canberra), with the 1894 vote from Kroessler (1995) · City of Greater New York · NYC Law Department, New York City Charter Revision