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To assure themselves a chance to vote in their most critical Mayoral election since 1913, New Yorkers swarmed to registration places all last week. When the Board of Registry closed its books, 2,322,382 citizens had entered their names—a turnout 6% greater than the city's vote in last autumn's bloodless national revolution. The number of candidates to be voted on Nov. 7 was proportionate to the num-ber of incipient voters. In the field were 28 parties. There were nine candidates for Comptroller, ten for Mayor, so many that it looked as though voting machines could not be used. But eliminating crackpots and perennial political protestants, the race for the nation's third most potent elective job was to be run by three men. Tammany's chances of victory had never been slimmer, for against it were arrayed not one reform candidate, but two. One was the most aggressive figure in the city's political life. The other enjoyed the patronage of the White House. Joseph Vincent McKee was the last of the major candidates to have his name entered on the ballots. Twelve men staggered into the Board of Elections carrying nine fat volumes in which 115,000 people had signed their names petitioning that he be placed in the running. Many a signer had written in McKee's name at last November's special Mayoral election, after McKee had served 16 weeks as Acting Mayor following James John ("Jimmy") Walker's flight from City Hall (TIME, Sept. 12, 1932). Now, having retired from politics, having refused the Fusion nomination which went to onetime Congressman Fiorello Henry LaGuardia, McKee entered the ring under an independent Democratic banner, as the "Recovery" candidate. There were two explanations offered for Joe McKee's decision to run for Mayor. The World-Telegram, Scripps-Howard crusader which had sponsored the write-in movement for him a year ago, turned bitterly against its former champion, denounced him for splitting the Reform ticket, declared that McKee's hankering for another taste of public life had been whetted last month when, as leader of a bankers' section of the NRA parade, he had failed to receive such cheers as rang in his ears when he was President of the Board of Aldermen and Acting Mayor. More credible was this straight political reasoning: Postmaster General James Aloysius Farley, national and State chairman of the Democracy, was out with his Bronx ally, New York's Secretary of State Edward Joseph Flynn, to crush Tammany and bring New York City into President Roosevelt's political dominion through Mr. Flynn's longtime protege McKee. Mr. McKee's hesitancy before he finally decided to run was attributed by his friends to his ill-health, a revelation which his age (44) and general appearance of pepticity made hard to believe. The McKee record is an extraordinary one, interpretable so ambiguously that even before he made his keynote address at Cooper Union last week it was both a boon and a handicap to him. Joseph McKee was born in Newark, raised in The Bronx. He worked his way through Fordham, taught there and at De Witt Clinton High School. He went to the State Assembly in 1918, became the youngest city Judge in 1924, youngest Aldermanic President in 1926. In that office he raised no violent anti-Tammany protests, but Samuel Seabury's municipal investigations spattered no mud on McKee's coat