To the editor:
Community is a sport in Pelham—and we’re very good at it. We volunteer our time. We donate our money. We look after each other’s kids—and warn each other about rabid coyotes and speeding cars. We sell out Novel Night and celebrate The Picture House. We wag our fists at loud music in the middle of the night, and we cheer our athletes, from Glover Field to Paris. We do all this together—even with people whose politics might be different from our own.
On this Election Day, residents of the Village of Pelham Manor can strengthen our community by inviting even more neighbors to get involved in our local government.
Proposition 3 would move our village elections to November from their current odd date in March. This is a triumph for convenience—and a blow to endless, exhausting campaigns.
Best of all, Prop 3 will increase voter participation as our village faces critical issues like flood mitigation and rising crime concerns. The data from the past seven years is striking: Participation in our November elections is 200% greater, on average, than what happens in March. That means 1,445 more neighbors, on average, cast ballots in November—in a village with only a few thousand voters in total. (Even if you look only at “contested” elections in 2018 and 2021, November still gets an average of almost 600 extra neighbors to the polls!)
Isn’t this awesome? Isn’t it great that we can have elections with so much more participation simply by moving the date away from the clutter of school breaks, family vacations, and religious holidays in March?
But, alas, it’s 2024, and in politics we’ll always have folks with different perspectives.
Our village government spent more than $58,000 of our taxes fighting to keep Prop 3 off the ballot with some technical logic that the state Supreme Court smacked down. It was a very bizarre thing for our village government to do, given the massive support for just holding a vote, but somewhere behind those antics is an argument that deserves respectful consideration.
Opponents of Prop 3 make the case that we should have a “distinct divide” between “national” and “local” politics. According to their flyers, these campaigners worry that national news might “overtake local issues” and distract us from focusing on Pelham Manor with “clear eyes.” They’re afraid we’ll “conflate” national candidates with local ones—as if our small-town brains wouldn’t know whether we were supporting Trump or Harris or our next-door neighbor.
Personally, I have full faith in our ability to navigate Pennsylvania Avenue and Wolfs Lane. We’re suburban families. We’ve mastered multi-tasking!
But I don’t believe this is the real reason some folks are foaming against Prop 3.
If you keep reading their marketing, they go on to advocate for organizing elections around those people who are “genuinely invested in our local issues”—even if it means lower overall participation. They worry about the “character” of our village and the “integrity” of our elections if we make it easier for more people to vote. Their logic is tight: Make voting a hassle to keep the riff-raff away, to exclude people they have decided might not be “genuinely invested” in our “close-knit” community.
One “Vote No” Facebook Warrior summed-up his belief very clearly. He doesn’t want “uninformed sheep” to “shake things up” in Pelham Manor.
Friends, I’ll let you judge the merits of that argument yourself, but I think we can all agree that Prop 3 has crystallized a very deep divide in our community: Some people want to limit participation so that we can keep things as they have been for a very long time; other people hope broader participation might make our local government even stronger.
As we used to say in high school debate, that’s some clear clash.
For me, this is simple. Voting “yes” on Prop 3 invites hundreds of neighbors to get more involved with our local government. Period. Voting “no” on Prop 3 keeps our elections limited to a much smaller group. Period. All the other arguments—about saving a few thousand bucks or flipping over ballots—seem beside the point.
And yes, I know that more voters might bring some change. God forbid, these voters might decide to put a Democrat or two on a board that’s been dominated by Republicans for decades. That’s not a problem with democracy. That’s the point of democracy. And maybe, just maybe, with more neighbors involved and more voices represented, some of the bitterness dividing our town will begin to fade. Sometimes the best way to solve a problem is to ask for more help. That’s Pelham.
Michael Fanuele
616 Francis St.