While we may never settle whether Rockland County is “upstate” or “downstate,” our West Bank neighbors to the south did something interesting last month.

Rockland County government, along with those of Nassau, Oneida and Onondaga counties, have filed a lawsuit against the state seeking to block the implementation of a law passed last year that moves most elections – local, state, county, federal and whatever else – to even-numbered years. (Election schedules for judgeships and offices in cities, like Kingston, can only be changed by an amendment to the state constitution, which hasn’t happened yet. Also excepted are the offices of county clerk, district attorney and sheriff, all village offices and school boards.) This is set to go into effect next year. How it will work is as follows: county legislators elected in 2023 will serve a full two-year term, run in 2025 for a one-year term and run again in 2026 for a two-year term. The county executive, also elected last year, will serve a full four-year term, run for a three-year term in 2027 and a four-year term in 2030.

Rockland’s lawsuit argues that the law, approved by the Democratic-controlled state legislature and signed into law by the Democratic governor, violates the counties’ charters by forcing the terms of county elected officials to be shortened a year. Rockland County Executive Ed Day is a Republican in his third term in office. Ulster will not join Rockland’s lawsuit or file one of its own, county spokesperson Amberly Jane Campbell said on Tuesday.

The law, its proponents say, will increase overall voter turnout by moving the less-voted-in local elections to the same year as the more-voted-in congressional and presidential ones. Labeled as a “voting rights” law by Gov. Hochul, it was supported by a number of “good government” groups, including Common Cause and the New York Civil Liberties Union. “By consolidating more elections in even-numbered years when most voters are already planning to participate in an election, this change will increase voter participation in important local races,” Hochul’s press release stated. “For example, millions more New Yorkers participated in elections in 2020, when approximately 64 percent of eligible voters cast their ballots, than in 2021, when just 25 percent of eligible voters turned out to take part in local elections around the state.”

It will be up to the courts to decide, but your Editorial Team has had reservations about this move ever since it was proposed, for several reasons. One of our core beliefs is local matters. While bigger news outlets would have you think otherwise, what your local governments and school boards do has, for most of us, a lot more of an impact on our lives than what happens in D.C. We fear that lumping the majority of them together on one ballot in election cycles with federal and state races will serve only to drown out those important local contests, making them afterthoughts at best. While yes, turnout drops in odd-year elections, they are also the time when political discourse focuses on down-home issues and candidates. We think losing that time and focus will, in the long run, make local governments more opaque and unaccountable, not less.

We also wonder what impact these jam-packed ballots will have on voters themselves. Some elections already have a lot of offices and any number of propositions for voters to decide. Will ballots the length of your average CVS receipt be an improvement? Or will the type be so small that in addition to “I Voted” stickers, election workers will also have to hand out magnifying glasses? When word gets around that casting a ballot is more like a homework assignment than a vital civic duty, that won’t be good for turnout.

We understand the politics of it – Democrats always want more turnout and Republicans always want less – and it could well be that the Rockland suit is more about politics than defending New York’s tradition of home rule. New York hasn’t gone for the GOP since Reagan in 1984, but increased turnout in critical purple-district House elections could well tip the balance of Congress to the Dems in elections to come. Maybe that alone is why this change is happening.

Whatever the logic, we’re on Rockland’s side on this. Local elections are too important to be relegated to sideshow status, and we hope the judges hearing this case will agree.