On Nov. 4, Chapman voters will be asked for the second time in as many years to downsize a council for which there are no official candidates.

That there will be no names on the ballot is not new — the borough of roughly 200 surrounded by Moore Township has a long, proud tradition of write-in-only elections — but the race without named competitors comes amid Chapman’s recent struggles to fill vacancies on its council.

“There’s just too much to do, but so little people,” Mayor Dana Ackerman said in an interview on his front porch. “If you would like the mayor’s job or a council seat,” he said, it’s yours.

‘I won’t turn it down if I’m elected’

Tucked in the woods and surrounded in part by an abandoned quarry, Chapman can feel hidden within a state where billionaires and national political groups are spending millions on court races. Campaign signs in the 0.3-square-mile borough were scarce despite the impending election, and there were none for local races.

To call it campaign season in Chapman would be to dabble in misnomers — it’s just autumn. Even on Election Day, Chapman’s leaders say you’d be hard-pressed to find a local candidate electioneering outside the borough’s lone voting precinct.

“It’s no big mystery,” Council member Kenneth Klingborg said, seemingly surprised when a reporter asked him about the borough’s atypical way of running elections. “It’s just the way it’s always been done.”

Ackerman said the candidates don’t ask voters to write them in so much as the voters ask them to serve.

“People ask me, ‘Are you running for mayor?’ ” said Ackerman, the mayor since 2017. “And I say, ‘I won’t turn it down if I’m elected, but it’s up to you people to write my name in.’ ”

Nobody can quite peg when the tradition started or why it continues. When The Morning Call last wrote about the topic in 1999, the then-mayor gave a utilitarian rationale.

“It doesn’t pay us to file petitions because it costs us more than we get paid,” said then Mayor Harold Kocher, who died weeks after resigning in 2017. “Why should we do that?”

The reason today is more circular: Chapman holds write-in elections because Chapman holds write-in elections.

“We don’t put campaign signs out,” Klingborg said.

Both he and Ackerman tied the borough’s elections to those of America’s early years.

Elections during colonial times often lacked expensive paper ballots. Voice voting and blank ballots were common decades after independence, albeit rife with fraud. Only in the 1880s did the United States begin to adopt the ballot system used today, where candidate names are listed alongside their partisan affiliation.

Every other municipality in Northampton County has named candidates for most local races. Chapman, however, has exceeded the countywide turnout rate in all but the two most recent municipal elections since 2009.

‘They don’t want to take anything else on’

Despite its voter turnout, Chapman lately has been facing a numbers problem.

With one mayor, seven council seats, two auditors, a tax collector, and a judge and inspector of elections, 6% of Chapman residents are, theoretically, elected officials. Bath, with an identically sized government, has more than 12 times as many residents (though it also lacks competitive local elections).

Put differently, Chapman is low on willing public servants, and there isn’t much population to pick from.

“We can’t get people to serve,” Ackerman said. “It’s as simple as that.”

In the last few decades, it has largely been the same cast of characters running Borough Hall. Often, they were related. But they are aging — the mayor and most of the council are 65 and up — and one longtime council member, Dorothy Niklos, died in 2023.

The vacant seat was filled more than a year later by Klingborg, a former Council member and town pastor who is in his 70s. Then Council member Gordon Cumberland moved, creating another vacancy that has yet to be filled.

“It’s not healthy for our democracy,” said John Brenner, executive director of the Pennsylvania Municipal League. “And quite frankly, it’s not healthy for these local officials who shouldn’t be in office for a hundred years.”

It’s not just Chapman.

“It’s so many — so, so many — small communities, and as times change, you have people who don’t want to be elected officials, and then you also have nobody to staff these places, so no one doing the administration,” said Nicole Beckett, a longtime municipal government administrator and associate director for public service at Lafayette College’s Meyner Center, which studies state and local government. “Most places, after they lose a longtime person, they really struggle.”

Chapman’s population dropped after the quarry closed in 1959, but has recently begun rebounding due to an influx of renters, according to Council member John Fedor. That hasn’t generated any more council members, though.

“A lot of people are transitory,” he said. “And the other people, just like anything else today, are busy. They don’t want to take anything else on.”

The responsibility of a council member extends beyond meetings, held on the first Monday of each month. Grant writing and zoning also are the council’s responsibility. But there also is the politics of it all, and the possibility of the coarsened discourse plaguing national politics coming home.

Beckett noted a recent mass council resignation in a tiny Carbon County borough she works for after vitriol and threats consumed a July council meeting. Most of the Parryville councilmembers rescinded their resignations, but Beckett and one councilwoman did not.

“The responsibilities of an elected official in a small community are significant,” Beckett said. “And I think having to be there for the right reasons and then doing it in the correct way, that’s a huge lift.”

Chapman tries again

This year will be the second time Chapman voters are asked to downsize their council. Last year was the first.

The 2024 ballot initiative came amid the vacancy created by Niklos’ death. The council struggled for more than a year to find a replacement, and saw shrinking the council from seven to three as a way to ensure a full roster.

“Everybody has a lot of stuff to do,” Council member Christopher Cortright told LehighValleyNews.com at the time. The borough’s leaders still see busy-ness as a barrier to local government.

But voters rejected the initiative by a 50-point margin. It was also a presidential election year, and 84% of Chapman voters cast ballots.

“I, as mayor, was not for lowering it to three,” Ackerman said, because of “responsibilities as a councilman. We have zoning now.”

This year, the borough is asking voters to shrink the council to five. The mayor said he expects the ballot initiative to pass. The numbers problem still looms, however.

“It’s just not there from the population we have,” Fedor said. “When the rubber meets the road, we can’t continue unless somebody fills a seat.”

Trebor Maitin is a freelance writer.

Originally Published: October 23, 2025 at 7:00 AM EDT