Cato, N.Y. — In September, when the ballots were printed for the town elections in Cato, it seemed the races were already won. There were no challengers for any of the five spots.
That’s how things usually were in this town of 2,500 in rural Cayuga County.
But less than six weeks before Election Day, a full slate of candidates mounted a write-in campaign for all five of the town posts up for election. And then they defied the odds by sweeping the entire ballot.
It wasn’t about Republican or Democrat here, where nearly 70% of the residents voted for President Donald Trump. It didn’t have anything to do with the immigration raids at the Nutrition Bar Confectioners plant that made national news.
Over the past year, there was a litany of trouble in this small town, according to posts in Green Gator News, a local Facebook news site that reports on everything from political news to photos from the Cato-Meridian football games.
There were allegations of illegal meetings, the town clerk’s post became a revolving door, the town supervisor’s sister-in-law ended up getting appointed to the job, according to the Green Gator. Then she left, too.
But her name was still on the ballot. If she won, that meant the town board would appoint someone to fill that spot. They’d do the same with Gerald Hunter’s spot if he won. The town board member died unexpectedly on Oct. 23.
Townspeople started paying attention. They decided they wanted to make the choices.
Kathy Pelkey, a retired paralegal who is also a sheep farmer, decided to run for the clerk’s job in late September. She took the job weeks before an interim basis when no one else stepped up.
“No matter who you are voting for, this election is evidence of the strength and benefit of our democratic republic,” Pelkey wrote in a post on her Facebook page a week before the elections.
Pelkey was among the first to decide to mount a write-in campaign. By mid-October, there were signs up all around town and ads on social media for every race: clerk, two town board seats, the supervisor and the highway superintendent.
“It kind of snowballed,” said Meaghan Burnett. Burnett helped the write-in slate; her day job is freelancing on much larger political campaigns.
She lives just outside the town limits, so she can’t vote, but she considers it her town, she said. She didn’t like the direction she saw things going, she said. The write-ins became a live case study in democracy in 2025.
It sounded like a long shot, but like so many places across the nation Tuesday night, Cato was ripe for change.
Pelkey, a retired paralegal who runs a farm in the town, offered to take the interim clerk job because someone had to. There are taxes to collect and paperwork to manage.
Then she decided to run because if she didn’t, there didn’t seem to be another likely candidate to do the job, she said.
Pelkey made postcards and went door-to-door to answer questions. And she showed people a sample ballot and how to write her name in. It’s not that people didn’t know how to spell it: Her family has been in the town for 200 years.
Jody Snyder, the first town clerk who some say was forced from her job, decided to take on Charles Ray, the town supervisor, in her own write-in campaign. She had worked for the town, mostly recently as clerk, for more than two decades.
The candidates did simple things: meet and greets at the American Legion, attending town board meetings, going door-to-door answering questions and showing people how to write them in.
Burnett did research, she said. What if someone wrote Jody’s name but spelled it wrong? Would that count? In a town so small, it wouldn’t matter. There was no one with a similar name.
Momentum grew. People around the town started showing up at town board meetings, en masse. One had 80 people at it, Burnett said, likely a record. A big meet and greet at the American Legion only had 40 people, but that’s because they put it on the same night as an away football game for the Cato-Meridian Blue Devils.
The Green Gator began livestreaming the town meetings. One of the meetings had 2,000 people watching, Burnett said. That’s 80% of the town, more than all the registered voters.
The slate of write-in candidates grew: Dave Berlinski and Wendy House were candidates for town council and Gary Cole, the current highway superintendent, decided to join the write-ins because he did not get the Republican nomination for another run.
No one was sure if it would work in a town where people had usually checked the boxes along the Republican line for years. For the write-ins to win, dozens of people would have to make conscious choices, in the right place, box by box, on that ballot.
They did. The write-ins won every spot.
The wins were largest in the supervisor and clerk’s race. Snyder, the former clerk, got more than 70% of the vote for town supervisor. Unofficial numbers show her beating Ray, 421 to 165. There are 1,774 registered voters in the town. Pelkey received more than 70% of the vote, as well.
“It’s the right thing to do for my community,” she said.
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