Why your local election is in an odd year

It was not an accident, and it was not cynical. It was a reform, argued for in good faith by people trying to fix something real. A century later it is the single largest reason almost nobody votes for the government closest to them.

The reform

In the late nineteenth century, American city government belonged to party machines. Reformers had a specific diagnosis and a specific fix. The diagnosis was that when the mayor’s race sat underneath the presidential race on the same ballot, people voted the party line all the way down, and the machine that delivered the national ticket collected city hall as change. The fix was to move the local election to its own day, and to take the party labels off it.

The argument was that paving roads and collecting refuse have nothing to do with national ideology, so a voter choosing a mayor should be thinking about the city rather than about Washington. That is a serious argument, and it is not obviously wrong. Between roughly 1894 and 1917 the Progressive movement pressed it city by city, and by 1940 it had substantially won. American local elections were overwhelmingly off-cycle, and most of them still are.

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Sources

• Sarah F. Anzia — Partisan Power Play: The Origins of Local Election Timing as an American Political Institution
• University of Chicago Center for Effective Government — The timing of local elections

What it does now

The reform worked as designed. It separated local elections from national ones. What its authors did not anticipate is how much of the electorate turns out for one and not the other.

Averages across US mayoral elections. Studies of cities that switched find gains of roughly twenty percentage points, a little more than a doubling; California cities that consolidated saw local turnout roughly triple.

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Sources

• MIT Election Data and Science Lab — The effect of election consolidation on turnout
• Manhattan Institute — The case for on-cycle local elections
• Common Cause California — Consolidation of elections creates massive gains in local voter turnout

The consequence is not simply that fewer people vote. It is which people. Sarah Anzia’s work on election timing makes the mechanism plain: organized groups with a direct stake in the outcome turn out at high rates whatever the date.

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Sources

• Sarah F. Anzia — Timing and Turnout: How Off-Cycle Elections Favor Organized Groups (University of Chicago Press)
• Sarah F. Anzia — Election Timing and the Electoral Influence of Interest Groups

Everyone else does not. So moving an election off the crowded day does not shrink the electorate evenly. It shrinks it around the people who were always going to show up, and their share of the result rises accordingly.

That is worth stating carefully, because it is easy to hear as an accusation. It is not one. A group that organizes its members to vote in a low-turnout election is doing something entirely legitimate, and often something admirable. The point is structural: a calendar decision made in 1911 to weaken one kind of organized advantage now produces another kind, and nobody chose that trade.

The case against changing it

Consolidation is not a free win, and the arguments against it are real rather than procedural.

Roll-off. Turning out is not the same as voting. Some of the people drawn in by a presidential race stop marking the ballot before they reach the school board, so part of the measured gain is arrival rather than participation.

Nationalization. This is the Progressive argument, still standing. On a ballot led by a presidential race, local candidates are read through national partisanship, and a voter with no information about a council candidate uses the party label as a shortcut. Higher turnout with less local knowledge is a genuine trade, not an obvious improvement.

Who decides. Election timing is usually set by a state, and moving it overrides choices individual localities made. That is a home-rule question independent of whether the change is a good one.

One thing worth noticing about this debate is that the usual coalitions do not hold. Support and opposition have both come from the right and the left depending on the state and on who currently benefits from the existing calendar, which is a decent sign that it is a structural question rather than a partisan one.

New York, which just did it

New York is the live case. A law signed in December 2023 moves many town and county elections outside New York City from odd to even years. It was challenged as a violation of the state constitution’s protections for local government, lost at trial, won on appeal, and was upheld unanimously by the Court of Appeals in October 2025. A separate federal challenge, brought by the state Republican committee, reached the US Supreme Court, which declined to hear it in March 2026. The change takes effect from 2026.

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Sources

• Brennan Center — New York Court of Appeals rules the state's even-year election law constitutional
• Albany Law School Government Law Center — The constitutionality of New York's even-year election law
• Democracy Docket — New York even-year election law challenge

New York City is not covered. Its own elections, along with certain county and judicial offices, sit behind the state constitution rather than ordinary legislation, so reaching them requires a constitutional amendment, which is a slower road with a public vote at the end of it. The largest city in the state keeps the odd-year calendar for now.

Where this leaves you

Election timing is one of the clearest examples of something this project keeps running into. The rules that decide how much say you have are rarely about you. They are old, they were set for reasons that made sense at the time, and they go on producing effects long after the reason has gone.

It is also worth keeping the size of the prize in proportion. Moving an election from an odd year to an even one changes turnout on one day. It does not change what happens on the other one thousand four hundred and sixty. Whichever calendar your city ends up on, the council still votes on a budget in the spring, and you still have no reliable way to reach anyone about it.

Which is the more interesting question. Not how many people show up to choose, but what any of them can do afterwards.