The myth about moving elections

Finger Lakes Times

February 14, 2026

In Focus: Josh Durso

For months now, critics of New York’s shift from odd-year to even-year local elections have warned that the change will devastate local democracy. They argue town boards will be forgotten thanks to presidential and congressional races. Community issues will disappear beneath national noise. Voters will lose their voice.

That diagnosis assumes local democracy is anything close to healthy on the participation front.

Even under the old system — when town and county elections enjoyed the luxury of standing alone on the ballot — public engagement was often worryingly thin. So much so that in some communities — a couple dozen people turning out to vote cast a majority of ballots.

The calendar didn’t fail local elections. Voters did.

Take a recent example from the Rochester suburbs. In the St. Paul Boulevard Fire District, which serves more than 19,000 residents and sits within a town of over 51,000 people, just 485 voters decided the fate of a $22 million capital plan for a new firehouse. Fewer than 1% of the population weighed in on a multi-decade public investment. That’s not a “city thing’“ or an anomaly, either. Every year there are dozens of Finger Lakes area races that end with vote counts that look like the final score of a Bills game — 35-31, 39-34, 23-20.

It’s a pattern repeated across rural New York where population has admittedly shrunk.

However, census data reminds us no matter how grim population numbers might look for community planners — they aren’t that bad. A few dozen turning out to vote in communities with populations in the 3,000 to 7,000 range — is not ideal in terms of participation.

And if that level of participation is what defenders of odd-year elections are trying to preserve, then we should be honest about what we are actually defending.

There is a deeply ingrained habit in civic life of romanticizing “the community.” Imagining that people are quietly eager to engage, deliberate, and take responsibility for the future of their towns. They just aren’t because the system isn’t arranged quite perfectly. If we re-arranged it — everything would be different!

But civic engagement is not sentiment. It’s behavior. And right now, most people are not engaging.

Some are stretched thin by work, family, and finances. Others have concluded — not entirely irrationally — that local government operates on autopilot regardless of who shows up. Still others may not even know when elections or special district votes occur.

Whatever the explanation, the result is the same. Consequential decisions are routinely made by a tiny, self-selecting slice of the public.

That reality makes the current debate over election timing feel oddly misplaced. Critics argue that moving local elections to even years will bury them beneath presidential and congressional contests. But local elections have already been buried — if not by national politics — by public indifference.

The reality is that odd-year elections did not produce robust turnout, informed debate, or widespread civic participation. They produced low-visibility contests dominated by highly motivated insiders, retirees, activists, and those with direct personal stakes. That may be a form of democracy, but it is not a particularly representative one.

Especially as communities — or their future needs — are less represented by those who consolidate power in small, rural towns.

Opponents of New York’s new election law are not wrong to worry about local governance being overshadowed. Their concern is understandable, and often comes with sincerity. There is a real risk that local issues receive less media attention during national election cycles. Campaign costs rise. Candidates compete for oxygen.

But the alternative they are defending — a system where a few hundred people regularly decide the direction of communities with several thousand residents — is not a healthy baseline. It is a warning sign.

If democracy is supposed to reflect the will of the people, then participation levels that barely register statistically should trouble us far more than whether a ballot appears in November of an odd or even year.

Timing matters at the margins. Engagement matters at the core.

The bigger problem is that local government has become too easy to ignore. Its decisions often feel distant, technical, or preordained. Meetings are sparsely attended. Ballots are confusing. Accountability is lackluster. Over time, many residents have quietly outsourced civic responsibility to whoever happens to show up.

Changing election timing will not fix that. But neither will clinging to a system that demonstrably failed to engage the public when it had every opportunity to do so.

If lawmakers, judges, and civic leaders are serious about strengthening local democracy, they should be asking harder questions. How do we make local government legible to ordinary people? How do we connect daily life — taxes, housing, roads, emergency services — to the decisions made in town halls? How do we reward participation?

It hits close to home here — because it’s a primary reason why I resumed writing this column.

Blaming the calendar for civic disengagement is easy, because it suggests the fix is easy. But it mistakes a symptom for the disease. The real challenge is not that local elections risk being drowned out by national politics. It’s that, for years now, they have struggled to earn the public’s attention even when given the stage entirely to themselves.

Local government doesn’t survive on wishful thinking. At some point, participation has to be more than something we talk about wanting. It has to be something people actually do.

Josh Durso is vice president of FingerLakes1.com; more columns like this can be found on the Substack. A former opinion writer for the Finger Lakes Times, his “In Focus” column ran biweekly for eight years.