court races<\/a>. Campaign signs in the 0.3-square-mile borough were scarce despite the impending election, and there were none for local races.<\/p>\nTo call it campaign season in Chapman would be to dabble in misnomers \u2014 it\u2019s just autumn. Even on Election Day, Chapman\u2019s leaders say you\u2019d be hard-pressed to find a local candidate electioneering outside the borough\u2019s lone voting precinct.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s no big mystery,\u201d Council member Kenneth Klingborg said, seemingly surprised when a reporter asked him about the borough\u2019s atypical way of running elections. \u201cIt\u2019s just the way it\u2019s always been done.\u201d<\/p>\n
Ackerman said the candidates don\u2019t ask voters to write them in so much as the voters ask them to serve.<\/p>\n
\u201cPeople ask me, \u2018Are you running for mayor?\u2019 \u201d said Ackerman, the mayor since 2017. \u201cAnd I say, \u2018I won\u2019t turn it down if I\u2019m elected, but it\u2019s up to you people to write my name in.\u2019 \u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt doesn\u2019t pay us to file petitions because it costs us more than we get paid,\u201d said then Mayor Harold Kocher, who died weeks after resigning in 2017. \u201cWhy should we do that?\u201d<\/p>\n
The reason today is more circular: Chapman holds write-in elections because Chapman holds write-in elections.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe don\u2019t put campaign signs out,\u201d Klingborg said.<\/p>\n
Both he and Ackerman tied the borough\u2019s elections to those of America\u2019s early years.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u2018They don\u2019t want to take anything else on\u2019<\/p>\n
Despite its voter turnout, Chapman lately has been facing a numbers problem.<\/p>\n
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).<\/p>\n
Put differently, Chapman is low on willing public servants, and there isn\u2019t much population to pick from.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe can\u2019t get people to serve,\u201d Ackerman said. \u201cIt\u2019s as simple as that.\u201d<\/p>\n
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 \u2014 the mayor and most of the council are 65 and up \u2014 and one longtime council member, Dorothy Niklos, died in 2023.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s not healthy for our democracy,\u201d said John Brenner, executive director of the Pennsylvania Municipal League. \u201cAnd quite frankly, it\u2019s not healthy for these local officials who shouldn\u2019t be in office for a hundred years.\u201d<\/p>\n
It\u2019s not just Chapman.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s so many \u2014 so, so many \u2014 small communities, and as times change, you have people who don\u2019t want to be elected officials, and then you also have nobody to staff these places, so no one doing the administration,\u201d said Nicole Beckett, a longtime municipal government administrator and associate director for public service at Lafayette College\u2019s Meyner Center, which studies state and local government. \u201cMost places, after they lose a longtime person, they really struggle.\u201d<\/p>\n
Chapman\u2019s 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\u2019t generated any more council members, though.<\/p>\n
\u201cA lot of people are transitory,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd the other people, just like anything else today, are busy. They don\u2019t want to take anything else on.\u201d<\/p>\n
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\u2019s responsibility. But there also is the politics of it all, and the possibility of the coarsened discourse plaguing national politics coming home.<\/p>\n
Beckett noted a recent mass council resignation<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n\u201cThe responsibilities of an elected official in a small community are significant,\u201d Beckett said. \u201cAnd I think having to be there for the right reasons and then doing it in the correct way, that\u2019s a huge lift.\u201d<\/p>\n
Chapman tries again<\/p>\n
This year will be the second time Chapman voters are asked to downsize their council. Last year was the first.<\/p>\n
The 2024 ballot initiative came amid the vacancy created by Niklos\u2019 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cEverybody has a lot of stuff to do,\u201d Council member Christopher Cortright told LehighValleyNews.com at the time. The borough\u2019s leaders still see busy-ness as a barrier to local government.<\/p>\n
But voters rejected the initiative by a 50-point margin. It was also a presidential election year, and 84% of Chapman voters cast ballots.<\/p>\n
\u201cI, as mayor, was not for lowering it to three,\u201d Ackerman said, because of \u201cresponsibilities as a councilman. We have zoning now.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s just not there from the population we have,\u201d Fedor said. \u201cWhen the rubber meets the road, we can\u2019t continue unless somebody fills a seat.\u201d<\/p>\n
Trebor Maitin is a freelance writer.<\/p>\n
Originally Published: October 23, 2025 at 7:00 AM EDT<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On Nov. 4, Chapman voters will be asked for the second time in as many years to downsize…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":12316,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[119,121,120,9597,836,182,139,434,28,50,432],"class_list":["post-12315","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-allentown","tag-allentown","tag-allentown-headlines","tag-allentown-news","tag-chapman","tag-election","tag-local-news","tag-news","tag-northampton-county","tag-pennsylvania","tag-politics","tag-top-stories-tmc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12315","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12315"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12315\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12316"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12315"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12315"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12315"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}