A couple weeks ago I wrote about the state’s push to move local elections to even-years. It’s tied up in court, but the expectation across New York is that the change is coming. The point of that column was simple: participation in small-town government is collapsing, and when participation collapses, representation goes with it. Attorney William Brewer III responded in the Finger Lakes Times by turning that into a constitutional argument and leaning on New York City turnout as a rebuttal — a media-saturated global city used to explain towns where campaigns run on yard signs and Facebook posts.
That doesn’t engage the argument. It avoids it.
He also recasts my position as preferring uninformed voters over informed ones. I didn’t. I argued that a system decided by a tiny slice of habitual voters is already failing the representational test — and calling that engagement doesn’t make it so. Instead of responding to a version of the column that wasn’t written, here’s the actual answer.
Democracy isn’t tyranny just because more people show up
If moving local elections onto November ballots is “tyranny,” then the word has lost all meaning.
That’s the charge leveled in response to my recent column on New York’s even-year election law — that combining municipal races with federal contests burdens First Amendment rights, produces “low-information voting,” and structurally suppresses local candidates. It’s dramatic language. It also collapses under scrutiny.
Start with the basic premise. Off-cycle local elections in New York routinely produce turnout in the teens — and often far lower. In some communities, a few dozen or a few hundred ballots decide tax levies, borrowing, zoning policy and public safety budgets affecting thousands.
That’s direct observation from the Finger Lakes — not conflation with New York City. More on that later.
Decades of political science research — including work from Stanford University and The Public Policy Institute of California — has found that off-cycle elections tend to be decided by smaller, more affluent and habitual voting populations. Populations that simply don’t look like the communities they govern. When those same local races are held alongside state or federal contests, turnout often multiplies and the electorate broadens, even though some voters skip portions of the ballot.
Courts pay attention to that distinction because election law does not evaluate voting rules in the abstract. Judges weigh whether a system meaningfully burdens participation or instead expands it. Evidence that timing changes who can realistically take part — and whether the resulting electorate resembles the public — goes directly to whether a regulation undermines democracy or promotes it.
It’s not tyranny. That’s representativeness.
Critics will argue that combining elections creates “displacement.” That local races are pushed aside by higher-profile contests. But displacement implies something robust was there to begin with. In much of Upstate New York, local participation was already thin long before this law was drafted.
The response to my column suggests there’s a choice between higher turnout and informed voting. It also implies that a smaller, more attentive electorate is preferable to a larger, imperfect one. That is a defensible theory of democracy. It just isn’t the one our system is built on.
American elections aren’t classroom exams, either. They’re a way to hear from as many people as possible. Not every voter studies every issue, and some skip parts of the ballot. That’s normal. The alternative isn’t a better-informed public. It’s government decided by a small group of people.
A perfectly informed electorate of 80 is still less representative than a moderately informed electorate of 8,000.
The legal argument doesn’t really land either — and obviously, I’m not an attorney. But you don’t need a law degree to notice that elections get regulated all the time. Ballot order changes, filing deadlines exist, primaries happen on the same day, and candidates always compete for attention on ballots. Sometimes they’re even crowded. That’s not a constitutional crisis. That’s just how elections work.
The First Amendment protects the right to speak. It doesn’t guarantee a quiet room.
Citing New York City’s recent mayoral turnout as proof that odd-year elections work proves something else entirely. New York City is one of the largest media markets in the world, with nonstop coverage, advertising saturation, and millions of habitual voters. Of course turnout can surge there under the right circumstances. That says little about towns of 3,000 or 7,000 residents with no daily newspaper, limited broadcast coverage and campaigns run on a pair of work boots.
In smaller communities, the behavioral reality is straightforward. Voting is habit-driven. When people are already at the polls for president or governor, they are more likely to complete the ballot in front of them than return months later for a standalone local election. In fact, it’s more likely they never even hear about the local election held on its own.
That isn’t cynical. It’s observable. You know, if one were to do the work in the rural communities that stand to benefit most from unified elections.
But, let’s be clear: None of this means moving elections will magically cure civic disengagement. It won’t. Local government often feels technical, procedural and distant. Meetings are sparsely attended. Accountability can be murky. And changing the calendar won’t change that.
But preserving a structure that reliably produces tiny, skewed electorates doesn’t fix it either.
Calling this reform “tyranny” implies something is being taken away. It isn’t. Local offices will simply appear in front of more voters. Some will skim, some will skip — but many will vote. Democracy isn’t built on carefully curated participation. The real risk isn’t that more people show up under less-than-ideal conditions. It’s designing a system where most never show up at all and pretending that scarcity is a strength.
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