Meredith Election Win

Source: Alliance for Meredith | Law, Letters, New York

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We have the final votes in, so I want to report on election results here in Meredith where our candidate won a landslide victory, capturing a majority on the Town Council.

The Alliance for Meredith recruited three candidates for the positions opening on the Town Council (supervisor and two other council seats). Their platform included a pledge to rewrite our town’s wind ordinance to ban industrial wind turbines in the town. They will do so when sworn in this January. Neither of the wind developers in town has submitted applications for projects to date, and none will be able to be submitted and approved in that time frame.

There was a record turnout (over 70% of registered voters). Our supervisor candidate (Keitha Capouya) received 65% of the votes, and the town council (Dan Birnbaum and Ron Bailey) candidates 63%. They ran on the Democratic, Conservative, and new Meredith Unity Party lines. They had previously run in a primary against incumbent Democratic pro wind candidates and received 85% of the votes.

We are so delighted that the full range of voters came out to crush the pro-wind candidates. The vote was across party lines (Meredith is predominantly Republican), and across demographics including length of residence in the town.

From day one (which was two years ago) we had a strategy directed toward this election. We were lucky to have a core group who happen to have a diverse set of talents; represent various segments of the town’s population; and willing to work tirelessly – -communicating endlessly by listserve, running educational meetings, writing and mailing newsletters, raising money, signing petitions, creating a database of voters, producing election flyers and advertisements, organizing 30 block captains to talk to neighbors and get out the vote. I am not sure how much of our plan is reproducible elsewhere, but our roadmap – some planned at the outset and a lot made up as we went along – worked here.

If anyone feels it would be useful to get more info on our experience in Meredith, feel free to contact me.

Ken Jaffe
Alliance for Meredith
607-746-2294