Somerville will get an unusual Wednesday voting day next year as part of the special City Council election brought on by a departure for the Legislature and a resignation.
In the special election for wards 2 and 3 to fill the seats of JT Scott and Ben Ewen-Campen, respectively, residents can pick up nomination papers Nov. 16. They have two and a half months to qualify (with 50 signatures from registered voters in their ward, filed by 5 p.m. Dec. 9) and campaign for a preliminary election to he held Feb. 2 – a Tuesday, the traditional days for voting, and the soonest allowed by city and statute, said elections director Nicholas Salerno to the City Council at its regular meeting Thursday.
The final election that follows will come March 24 – unusually, a Wednesday.
The Board of Election Commissioners must “take it by statute, and we have endeavored to pay close attention,” Salerno said. “Once we go through all the steps that are required that we have to do between the preliminary and the general election, we were going to hold the election on Tuesday, March 23 – but we couldn’t do that, because there’s a religious holiday,” Salerno said, referring to Holy Tuesday.
The earliest possible final election, then, is the very next day.
“Now, precedent has been set in the past for different days of the week other than Tuesday, so don’t let that get anybody too nervous here,” Salerno told councilors.
Leaving for the Legislature
Ewen-Campen won a Democratic primary Sept. 1 for the 27th Middlesex District seat held by state representative Erika Uyterhoeven, who is moving on to take the 2nd Middlesex District seat of retiring state senator Pat Jehlen. City laws say there must be a special election for ward council seats empty more than 180 days before the end of a term; that means a special election had to be run to fill Ewen-Campen’s seat representing Ward 3.
When Ewen-Campen won reelection in 2025, he ran unopposed, so there’s no runner-up to tap as his successor.
Will Mbah, the council’s vice president, is also leaving for the Legislature, having won his Sept. 1 primary race to replace state senator Christine Barber in the 34th Middlesex District. As an at-large candidate in November, though, Mbah can be replaced by candidates in that race who were lower in the voting, and based on election results in 2025, he is likely to be replaced by labor leader and former mayoral candidate Marianne Walles.
Opting out and expressing interest
Almost immediately after the primary, there was an additional jolt to local politics: Five-term councilor Scott announced Sept. 3 that he will step down Dec. 31.
“By announcing my irrevocable intent to resign at the end of 2026, it allows the city to schedule one special election for both seats and minimize the time that either ward is without a representative on the council,” Scott said.
Ward 3 has a candidate already in community organizer and activist Derrick Rice.
Serena Taylor of Prospect Hill in Ward 3 filed with the state Aug. 24 for a council run. Taylor is president emeritus and a member of the board of directors of the Somerville Homeless Coalition.
Emily Doran, co-chair of the Union Square Neighborhood Council and a member of the team that negotiated community benefits for development at Somernova, has expressed interest in Scott’s seat.
