After counting the remaining absentee and affidavit ballots, the Tompkins County Board of Elections announced on July 2 that Cornell undergraduate Hannah Shvets ’27 won the Democratic primary for Ward 5 Common Council alderperson with 40.49 percent of the vote.
The two other democratic candidates, G. P. Zurenda Jr. and Deborah Fisher, received 33.47 percent and 25.77 percent of the votes, respectively. Zurenda is now planning to run against Shvets in the Nov. 4 general election as an independent, under the Affordable Ithaca Party, a body of his own creation.
This particular race was the only one from the June 24 Tompkins County primaries that did not have a clear winner by the end of election day. Preliminary results showed Zurenda receiving 38.73 percent of the votes and Shvets receiving 34.51 percent of them, but the race was too close to call without counting the 22 remaining affidavit and mail-in ballots, Stephen DeWitt, Democratic commissioner for the Tompkins County Board of Elections, said. Shvets won by a margin of victory within 20 votes, prompting a manual recount of the votes scheduled for July 8 at 11 a.m.
Sam Poole ’28, campaign manager for Shvets, said her campaign was expecting the race to be tight.
“We knew [the election results] could be close,” Poole said. “[Ward 5] is a low turnout district, and a lot of our base [is] students who are voting absentee or [voted absentee] after sending affidavit ballots. ... While, obviously, we would have been happy to have won election night, we weren't overly concerned that that didn't happen.”
Only 143 ballots were cast for the Ward 5 alderperson democratic primary, as compared to 656 for Ward 1 and 665 for the Ward 3. With 3,121 ballots cast, only around 5.46 percent of registered voters in Tompkins County cast ballots in this election.
Although she believes the heat wave had a role in low turnout, Shvets said she thinks it points toward a larger issue of low voter engagement with students. She mentioned that since the primary falls after the end of Cornell’s spring semester, much of the eligible voting student population is gone for the election. Ward 5 includes Cornell University’s north campus and part of its west campus.
“Even though [Ward 5] is a majority student district, [they are the] minority of people who show up,” Shvets said. “So to me, this means that we need to keep working on bringing students into the Ithaca community and making them feel like this is their home, and these elections affect them too, because they do.”
Zurenda said he felt that he and Fisher would likely split the “local vote” and thus turn the primary over to Shvets. Despite running as a Democrat, he went ahead and carried a petition to run as a third-party candidate as well.
Similar to Shvets, one of his main issues is the increasingly high price of living in Ithaca. But, while a major focus of Shvets’ is to protect county workers by raising labor wages to keep up with the high cost of living, Zurenda said the restrictions imposed by the financial ability of taxpayers to fund this increase must be taken into account. Shvets, instead, said city spending should not be viewed with an “austerity mindset.”
“The tax bills for city residents have gone up dramatically over the past several years and [have amounted] to approximately a 36 percent increase over the past three years,” Zurenda said. “That's unsustainable, ... and if that doesn't change, many permanent Ithaca residents like myself are going to have to sell their homes and move out of town because they can't afford the taxes.”
As the general election approaches, Zurenda said he will continue to advertise his position through press and social media. Shvets also mentioned continuing her current campaign practices, focusing on interacting with voters and hearing their concerns.
“I'm just going to continue ... speaking to people and their concerns and making sure that Ithaca is a place where people can actually stay no matter what their background is,” Shvets said.
Shubha Gautam is a reporter at The Ithaca Times through the Cornell Summer Experience Grant and a senior writer at The Cornell Daily Sun. This article was previously published in The Ithaca Times.
Shubha Gautam is a senior writer and a member of the Class of 2028 in the College of Arts and Sciences. She can be reached at sgautam@cornellsun.com.
