The difficulty of local election consolidation
An effort by the New York legislature to consolidate local elections with statewide elections is a case study for how state constitutions can muck things up
Edit: An earlier version of this post referred and linked to Assembly Bill 04282 rather than Assembly Bill 4282B, which passed the state legislature. The bills do not materially differ from each other, but this post has been updated to reflect the distinction.
In the United States, we hold a lot of elections—a 2012 estimate by Professor Jennifer Lawless estimated that there are about 500,000 elected officials in our country—and we quite like spreading them out over both even- and odd-numbered years. Most voters live in states that conduct elections for state offices, like governor and state legislature, in midterm election years and that hold elections for school boards in odd-numbered years—which means that the voter intending to participate in every single election possible must show up to the polls at least once every year. Bonkers!
When we hold elections is a choice that, perhaps more than anything else, determines the composition of government. The murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014 highlighted the disparity between the demographics of Ferguson and the makeup of its city government—owing to off-year, nonpartisan elections, majority-Black Ferguson had a majority-white city council.
In the past few years, democratic reformers around the country have proposed moving local elections from odd-numbered years to even-numbered years in the hopes of dramatically increasing turnout. In some states, this is being done at the local level on a city-by-city basis—most prominently, in Los Angeles and San Francisco. In other states, legislatures have attempted to move all localities en masse to holding elections in even-numbered years.
But statewide efforts to consolidate local elections are complex—and can easily run afoul of state constitutional provisions regarding counties and municipalities.
In New York, the state legislature recently passed Assembly Bill 4282B, which would move most local elections to even-numbered years. The bill is confusingly written—not because of poor drafting on the sponsor’s part, but because local government law in New York is incredibly fractured and the sponsor wants the bill to comply with the New York Constitution.
Given that the passage of AB 4282B will affect how tens of millions of New Yorkers are governed—and that it’s fairly representative of the challenges that consolidation efforts face—I wanted to walk through the complexities of consolidation generally, what AB 4282B does, and why I think that its sponsor’s understanding of the New York Constitution is wrong.
The alignment of different elections for different offices on different dates has a long, complicated, and frequently contradictory history. Elections today are both more and less consolidated than elections at any point in the last two-and-a-half centuries. Before the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November was established as the de facto general election date, states routinely held their elections at different times of the year. The maxim “As Maine goes, so goes the nation” refers to the fact that most elections in Maine were held in September, not November, until the 1950s. The performance of the parties in Maine’s September elections was seen as reasonably predictive of their performance nationwide in November.
On the flip side, throughout the twentieth century, reformers pushed to de-consolidate certain elections from nationwide contests. In the early days of the United States, most governors were elected to two-year terms—and in some states, one-year terms. As these terms were expanded to four years in the 1900s, many state legislators and constitutional convention delegates purposely chose to schedule gubernatorial elections for midterm election years to localize the races and remove nationwide partisanship from state-level contests.
And in the early 1900s, local elections were deliberately moved to odd-numbered years or other off-cycle schedules by Progressive era reformers with a similar goal in mind.
These opposite movements help contextualize why the efforts of today to consolidate local elections with statewide and nationwide election dates is so challenging. Many state constitutions include articles relating to counties, cities, or local governments generally. Take, for example, the New Mexico Constitution, which requires that district attorneys (elected by judicial district) and county assessors, clerks, probate judges, sheriffs, and treasurers all be elected “to four-year terms.”
As far as requirements go, merely mandating a four-year term isn’t particularly onerous. But it does make election consolidation more challenging! In 2019, the state legislature passed HB 407, which was referred to as the “Election Laws 50-Year Tune-Up.” Among other changes, it consolidated elections for district attorney and county offices—and to accomplish the change, lengthened the term of office for some officeholders to six years. In response, the New Mexico Supreme Court struck down the challenged portions of the law, concluding that “extending” the terms of certain officeholders to six years violated the state constitution’s four-year term requirement.
Accordingly, let’s consider how New York’s AB 4282B attempts to achieve its goal of moving most local elections to even-numbered years. Local government in New York—and, to be honest, any of the original Thirteen Colonies—is unnecessarily complex. In New York, there are 62 cities, 933 towns, 534 villages, and 62 counties. It’s also important to note that New York City itself is special—it wholly includes five counties (referred to in the constitution as “counties in the City of New York”), which we understand as the five boroughs.
City elections are set by the state constitution, which provides, in Article XIII, Section 8, “All elections of city officers, including supervisors, elected in any city or part of a city . . . shall be held on the Tuesday succeeding the first Monday in November in an odd-numbered year[.]” So changing the timing of city elections requires a constitutional amendment, which the legislature acknowledges.
Town elections are held every two years, and are currently scheduled for the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November in odd-numbered years. While we might be tempted to think of towns as smaller than cities, the largest town—Hempstead, population 793,409 as of the 2020 Census—is the second-largest municipality in the state after New York City. The scheduling of town elections is set by Section 80 of the New York Town Law, part of state statutes, and is thus something that the legislature can change statutorily.
Villages are much smaller than cities and towns—the largest village, Hempstead, located in the town of Hempstead, only has a population of 59,169—and are usually located inside of towns. Village elections are generally less standardized, but are roughly set by Section 3-302 of the New York Village Law, and thus are generally subject to legislative modification.
Finally, there are 62 counties in the state, and county elections are set both by the state constitution and state statutes, depending on the office in question.
What AB 4282B proposes is to move most town elections to even-numbered years beginning in 2026 and some county elections to even-numbered years beginning in 2028. The way that it does this isn’t terribly straightforward when reading the text of bill itself, but here’s the gist of it: Rather than shortening the terms of current elected officials, which is likely not possible under the state constitution, the bill modifies the length of the term that candidates in the next election will be elected to.
For towns, officials elected in 2025—the first year that this bill would come into effect—would only be elected to a one-year term, and would then be elected to two-year terms in even-numbered years beginning in 2026.
For counties, the officials to which this bill applies—basically, all county officials except sheriffs, county clerks, district attorneys, and most judges—are treated like town officials, in that they would serve out the remainder of their terms, be elected to shortened terms one time, and then would be elected to their regular terms in even-numbered years. For county legislators, who are elected to two-year terms, it’s straightforward enough.
But for officials like county executives, who are generally elected to four-year terms, things would be more complicated. They, too, would serve out the terms to which they were elected, and then would be elected to shortened terms to put them on an even-year schedule. When that happens, however, depends on when the official was originally elected.
The relevant measuring point in the bill explains that
a county elected official . . . elected and serving their term as of January 1, 2025[,] shall complete their full term as established by law. Provided, however, that if the completion of such full term results in the need for an election in an odd-numbered year after January 1, 2025, the county . . . official elected at such election shall have their term expire as if such official were elected at the previous general election held in an even-numbered year.
The changes to county-level elections is confusing, so here’s how it would play out. Suppose that Democrat Mark Poloncarz, the incumbent Erie County Executive, is re-elected to another four-year term this year, and is sworn into that term on January 1, 2024. As of January 1, 2025, Poloncarz would be “elected and serving [his] term.” Accordingly, he would “complete [his] full term.” His term would next be up in 2027, an odd-numbered year, which would “result[] in the need for an election in an odd-numbered year after January 1, 2025.” Accordingly, Poloncarz would be elected to a three-year term in 2027—because his term would “expire as if [he] were elected at the previous general election held in an even-numbered year,” which here would be 2026. As such, his term would next expire at the 2030 election.
For an official who was first elected in 2021, it would play out similarly. Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman was elected in 2021, and his term is next up in 2025. Accordingly, like Poloncarz, Blakeman will be “elected and serving [his] term” as of January 1, 2025, which he will complete. His office would next be up in 2025, an odd-numbered year, “resulting in the need for an election in an odd-numbered year after January 1, 2025.” Therefore, Blakeman would be elected to a three-year term in 2025, because it would expire as if he “were elected at the previous general election held in an even-numbered year,” which would be 2024. His next term would then expire at the 2028 election.
All of this is unnecessarily complicated, but legally necessary to avoid shortening the term of a current official.
One final note—elections for county clerk, district attorney, and sheriff are expressly excluded from AB 4282B because, as the sponsor says, terms for those offices are set by the state constitution. Instead, the legislature is considering proposing a constitutional amendment in 2024—which could be on the ballot no earlier than 2025—that would allow for consolidation of the elections for those offices.
I don’t think that’s the correct reading of the New York Constitution. The constitution used to say that “sheriffs, clerks of counties, [and] district attorneys” were elected to three-year terms, which would preclude any sort of alteration to future terms like AB 4282B is doing elsewhere. However, a series of constitutional amendments—the most relevant of which were ratified in 1972 and 1984—now provide that the county clerk, district attorney, and sheriff “shall be chosen by the electors once in every three or four years as the legislature shall direct” (emphasis mine).
As such, I really don’t see how the sort of phased-in modification that AB 4282B proposes for other county offices wouldn’t work for county clerks, district attorneys, and sheriffs, given that the legislature can “direct” whether they are elected to three- or four-year terms. My reading suggests that there’s no reason that the legislature couldn’t direct that those offices would be elected to three-year terms—just like county executives—and then four-year terms thereafter.
In any event, AB 4282B threads the needle as carefully as possible to avoid shortening or lengthening the term of any current elected official—which queues up a multi-year phase-in that begins in 2026 and ends in 2030. But the exclusion of a substantial number of county offices only serves to deprive the state of the benefits of election consolidation for a longer period of time. If a constitutional amendment were ratified in 2025 giving the legislature the power (which I think it already has) to modify the terms of all county officers, and the legislature adopted a similar bill to AB 4282B in 2026, the earliest that county elections would be consolidated might be 2032.