If Cambridge voters think their elections are complicated now, wait until after charter reform splits City Council and mayoral races for November 2027. (Maybe.)
The city’s governing document – its charter – says the nine-member council votes a mayor from its own members at the start of every two-year term, but the first charter review in more than 80 years proposes to shake things up, possibly letting residents vote for mayor directly, possibly changing the name to “city council president” and possibly undoing the rule that the mayor automatically becomes chair of the School Committee. (None of this would change the power of the City Manager’s Office and that mayor would remain in some ways a ceremonial post.)
No change was decided at a special council meeting last week. Instead, many details on this and other charter issues – budget powers and approval of the city manager’s choice of city solicitor, for example – have been pushed to a special meeting at 1:30 p.m. Monday.
Councillors seem headed toward taking mayoral elections out of the charter to be added to their own rules, as charter change is lengthy. Experts warned Thursday that complicating Cambridge’s ranked form of voting called “proportional representation” could be tricky and need to be fixed on the fly.
“This has implications,” said Elliott Veloso, deputy city solicitor. “We do not necessarily know if voting equipment can handle this, or this can be done on scale, because again, this hasn’t been tested.”
https://embed.documentcloud.org/documents/25538595-021825-charter-change/?embed=1
Choosing an option that allows the council to act flexibly without violating state law will be valuable “if something were to go catastrophically wrong,” Veloso said. “You would have a procedure in place that would allow you to again elect or select a mayor from amongst you … an emergency fallback.”
The proposal drawing the most discussion was to let council candidates who had already served at least one term be allowed to mark themselves “eligible for mayor” on ballots. The results could be ranked like council and School Committee races or look only at who among the eligible got the most No. 1 votes.
Two ballots, same names, different purposes
Either way, state law would require two ballots, city lawyers and an election official said, and that could be just the start of the complications: Council elections have seen upward of 25 candidates, and write-ins are allowed. With current and past councillors eligible for mayor, that ballot could have nine or more candidates. Each ballot would have different versions to ensure randomness, also called for by law.
“Two ballots – same names on different ballots,” Election Commission executive director Tanya Ford said, giving a sense of the possible confusion.
Election night counts in Cambridge are slow compared with neighboring communities, and doubling the number of ballots “could have an impact on processing times,” Veloso said – meaning it could delay election results even more.
Also, adding a mayoral process “can impact voter behavior,” Veloso said. “Now a voter is thinking, ‘Well, wait a minute, I do support that candidate, but he or she is running for the first time – so if I put them No. 1, they can never be mayor, and thus I’m wasting my No. 1 ballot. A voter could say, ‘I really support this incumbent, but I don’t want them to be mayor, so I’m going to rank them lower – not because I don’t support them, but because I don’t want them to be mayor.’”
Testing of Election Commission equipment would be needed to see how it handled the additional balloting, officials said, but there would also have to significant voter outreach and education.
“Many of our residents already don’t have a clue on how to vote in our ranked-choice voting system,” councillor Ayesha Wilson said.
Mayoral process can be “icky”
The current mayoral process has its problems too, councillors said.
Election of a mayor begins at the council’s inauguration – after being sworn in, councillors’ first task is to cast ballots for who among them gets to lead and sit on the School Committee. That can be fast, getting settled in a single session as it has been recently. But it can also get bogged down in internal politics, leaving the city, council and School Committee without a leader (and committee assignments) for months.
When there’s no mayor, the longest-serving councillor fills in. But that person won’t necessarily become mayor. “It really kind of throws the School Committee into a tizzy, because now we have a chair and not the mayor” and that person may say “I don’t want to vote for this, because I don’t know if I’m going to be here the whole time,” mayor E. Denise Simmons said.
Vice mayor Marc McGovern recalled the mayoral election the year he joined the council as being “messy … not a great look.” Councilor Patty Nolan had her own memories of “a really icky time after election, before the mayor.” That included this year as being “not healthy for the body to go through that. So I would love for us to figure out a way to have a more transparent process.”
“We’ve seen some Machiavellian stuff here in this chamber over the past 30, 40, 50 years,” councillor Paul Toner said. “That’s what most of us are trying to avoid.”
Timeline toward approval
As chair of the Government Operations Committee, Toner said he hoped to finish the council’s debate over charter changes Monday or “by very, very, very early March, so that we can send a package to the State House and give them all the time that they need.” After a home rule petition for a ballot question is approved on Beacon Hill, it comes back to the voters of Cambridge to see what changes they approve in November.
The Legislature’s approval process isn’t known, though. If permission for a charter vote comes in September, after a summer break, there will be little time for Cambridge to work with vendors on printing the needed ballots and educational information. “We would need more information in order to do a procurement process to bid out for the printing of the ballots and the ballot-question mailing to the voters, and I usually do that in June,” Ford said. “The final deadline is 35 days for an advisory question to be put on the ballot by the City Council. That’s cutting things extremely close” to a Nov. 4 ballot.
“This is making me nervous the more I think about this,” McGovern said. “These are big questions we’re asking, and people are going to need time to debate them and digest them.”
Not everyone on the council agreed with the move toward popular election of a mayor, with its potential for electoral confusion of various kinds. As a ceremonial role and leader of two legislative groups, the mayor “needs to be someone that we all respect and, though it sounds like it can be messy, I think the council should be choosing,” councillor Cathie Zusy said. “We should leave things as they are.”
A stronger
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Good start, let’s do away with the unelected city manager role next.
Bono wonders…
Why don’t we just elect the City Manager??
(Oops, Bono forgot; we have to “save our democracy…”)
The current process is very, very broken. I’m glad to have Simmons on the council, but she’s a horrible mayor. With the exception of Siddiqui, we’ve mostly had horrible mayors. The qualifications to be a councilmember and to be a mayor are different. Councilmembers voting for mayor gives flawed incentives. And most mayors aren’t qualified to lead the school committee. It’s good that there’s some crossover, but not at the head.
However, the alternatives seem just as broken. Only incumbents can be mayors? Talk about insider issues. Same ballot? Same problem.
We might:
– Rethink just eliminating the position and having a rotating chair
– Rethinking combining with city manager
– Have separate, direct elections, perhaps with a longer term
I’d love to have a broader discussion here, but I don’t expect we’ll see one.