New Haven Independent

Cammett, a 19 year-old Yale freshman from Brooklyn, stood in Woolsey Hall hoping to corral fellow students who live in the sliver of campus falling in the 22nd Ward. She planned to bring them to 200 Orange St. to vote in person in the elections taking place Tuesday for Democratic ward committee chairs.

Communities throughout the state are holding such elections Tuesday. These elections, invisible to all but the most politically engaged, are the ultimate in grassroots electoral politics: they determine which people are in charge of the party in each of the city’s 30 wards. Ward co-chairs also vote for the party chair. They take charge of getting out the vote at elections. They recruit aldermanic candidates as well as volunteers interested in city and neighborhood issues.

(Click here to see who’s running in New Haven and where to vote.)

Contested elections take place in only eight of 30 New Haven wards. Some, like Ward 24, involve ward-level grudge matches. Others, like two in Fair Haven, are outgrowths of the fall fight over the presidency of the Board of Aldermen.

Cammett’s running for co-chair in a ward that mostly encompasses the Dixwell neighborhood but does include part of Yale, including Timothy Dwight College, where she lives. Students were leaving campus Friday for spring break. So they won’t be around for the election. Cammett managed to deliver between 70 and 80 absentee ballots to students before they disappeared. Friday she asked others to come with her to the Hall of Records, where people leaving town are allowed to vote in person.

Cammett decided to run because she’s interested in politics. She has activism and politics in her genes: Her mom works for the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice. Her grandfather was dean of John Jay College. Her grandmother was chair of the faculty senate at CUNY. Cammett is studying political science at Yale, with a focus on international relations. (New Haven ward politics may prove more relevant to her studies than may appear at first blush.)

She’s running also because she has taken a liking to her new home city. It reminds her of the neighborhood where she grew up, the Fort Greene section of Brooklyn. “Especially Dixwell,” she said “It’s a tight-knit community. People invite you to their homes.”

She said she didn’t notice animosity toward Yale while campaigning in Dixwell. “A lot of people in Dixwell work for Yale. So they have a relationship” to the university, she said. They do “want to have a voice in making sure what Yale does in the community is beneficial to them.”