Pleasantville Debates Moving Village Elections to November

The issue of shifting Pleasantville’s village elections to November was debated last week after a longtime resident revealed that she has been working to submit a petition to force a referendum for the general election.

Resident Francesca Hagadus said she has started collecting signatures for the petition. The Board of Elections requires 400 valid signatures on the petition and for it to be submitted by Aug. 5 to make it on this year’s ballot.

“We are one of the few villages that don’t have elections in November,” Hagadus told the Village Board at its July 8 meeting. “The latest village to shift over was Sleepy Hollow. I’d like to ask you to consider moving the elections to November.”

Hagadus, who twice ran unsuccessfully for Village Board, including a candidacy earlier this year, said her proposal was not about her past campaigns but about concern over low voter turnout in local elections. Of the 5,021 registered voters in Pleasantville, only 641 voted in a contested election in March. Hagadus finished 56 votes behind Yemi Healy while Trustee David Vinjamuri was easily re-elected.

“To have a broad exposure to the issues that need addressing would really drive the message home and more than 641 people will show up to vote for village candidates,” Hagadus said. “Village elections have never had more than 1,000 people voting; 641 people showing up to vote is a crisis. It’s not democracy.”

Besides Pleasantville, villages that continue to have March elections are Bronxville, Buchanan, Elmsford, Port Chester and Rye Brook. Last March Sleepy Hollow residents voted over­whelm­ingly to move vil­lage elec­tions from March to No­vem­ber, a proposition that passed by about a 3-to-1 mar­gin. In 2022, Hastings-on-Hudson put up a similar proposition, which was supported by 88 percent of voters.

At last week’s Village Board meeting, Mayor Peter Scherer said he has spoken to many of Westchester’s village mayors where elections were moved to November.

“They have said they wished they hadn’t done it because the local issues were essentially sucked into the election cycle,” Scherer said. “I’ve yet to encounter a single elected official who said that switching to November highlighted the issues but rather it buried the issues.”

Hagadus argued that November village elections give more people a greater opportunity to examine the issues and would involve the League of Women Voters, which can hold candidate forums.

“There would be time to have more public forums, which gives you an opportunity to get to know the candidates better,” she said.

Typically, March elections have not featured formal candidate forums.

Scherer said a key disadvantage of moving the village election to November would be the weakening of the nonpartisan, independent platforms that the candidates run on.

“We have had the blessings of not running on the Republican or Democratic lines,” Scherer said. “One of my fears is that the November election system starts to draw into a party alignment.”

Scherer added that candidates running in other village elections in November are influenced by the two major parties because some voters vote on a straight party line without regard to down-ballot candidates.

“Everybody who sits at this table ran as an independent with no need to be anointed by anybody, no need to be chosen by anybody in a caucus or to confront a primary or spend a load of money to get here and that’s really been important,” he said.

Supporting the move to November elections was Raffaele Ferraioli, a village resident and owner of La Barberia hair salon. He said the current system is influenced by how many people a candidate knows in the community. In a general election, he believes voters are more focused on issues that concern them.

“If I know 1,900 people in the village, I get 1,900 votes and I can control an election,” Ferraioli said. “It’s very dangerous.”

Village Trustee Paul Alvarez, who was been elected twice, said there is a compelling argument to switch the elections to November, which could address the disturbing trend of low voter turnout.

“The biggest argument is how can we get more people involved, and obviously this is a solution,” Alvarez said. “A November election might also push the candidates to campaign more and get to know people more.”

But he expressed concern with people associating independent village candidates with one of the two major parties.

Vinjamuri said that more people would participate in a November election.

“It also helps certain classes of people who are more likely to be engaged in the general election and that can be a positive,” he said.

But changing the election date could raise some worrisome issues given the current political environment, Vinjamuri pointed out.

“We are in a climate where it’s a Citizen United world and if there was any interest in development in the village there would be the ability for a PAC (political action committee) to legally fund a certain candidate.”

Vinjamuri said he would like to first see how the change in election dates works for Sleepy Hollow.

The seats held by Alvarez and Trustee Nicole Asquith are scheduled to be up for election in March 2026. Scherer, Vinjamuri and Healy’s seats would be up a year later. Switching election dates from March to November would extend Asquith and Alvarez’s terms by more than seven months to November if the change was approved.

Scherer said there is time to discuss the issue further.

“If we’re respectful of all these different views, it’s worth having that conversation with the community,” Scherer said. “I don’t see what harm it causes to the folks who would like to see this happen, to push for a referendum in 2025 instead of 2024, since either year that it is potentially enacted would engage the public the next time there is a village election.”