Democracy in Columbia comes with a lot of fanfare. Election Day is Saturday and the planned community’s 10 villages are again beckoning residents with the promise of paper shredding, free native plants, carnival games and inflatable bounce houses.
“Bounce to the Ballot,” the village of Owen Brown advertised on social media in recent weeks. “Come for the Election, Stay for the FUN!”
The get-out-the-vote efforts hint at a problem: Not enough Columbia residents participate in the democratic process.
“I’m not gonna lie, it has been extraordinarily difficult and challenging” to engage more people, said Collin Sullivan, one of Columbia’s youngest elected officials. He spoke as an individual and not on behalf of the Columbia Association board of directors, on which he serves.
Developer James Rouse founded Columbia in 1967 with a vision of inclusivity and the goal of getting residents to “take possession of their cities and make them work for the people who live there.”
Nearly 60 years later, the unincorporated community of more than 100,000 is Maryland’s second largest city behind Baltimore. Yet participation in the local elections — for 10 village boards and the overarching Columbia Association board, essentially an umbrella homeowners association — historically has been abysmal.
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Not only are democracy and Rouse’s founding principles at stake, but so are how the community and its villages spend the millions they take in from the annual charge assessed on property owners. The association has a $91 million budget that comes from a 68-cent annual charge on every $100 of state-assessed property value. The money pays for the amenities — the pools, paths and programming — that help Columbia consistently rank among the best places to live and raise a family in national surveys.
Yet lately, some villages have held second elections because not enough people voted the first time. A few Columbia races have devolved into accusations of voter fraud, self-dealing and even dark money influencing campaigns.
Some residents and lawmakers want to reform the community’s elections, though not everyone agrees they need fixing.
Sullivan wonders if more people would vote and run for the boards if each village didn’t handle their elections so differently.
The village of Town Center’s website boasts that the varying election rules reflect how voting procedures differ across the 50 U.S. states. Sullivan, who represents that village, agrees, but said it creates confusion.
Varying election rules
Each village elects one representative to serve on the association’s board of directors, but some serve one-year terms while others serve for two years.
Wilde Lake and Dorsey’s Search residents get one vote per household, while River Hill gives suffrage to all residents over the age of 18. Renters in Harper’s Choice must file their lease with the village to vote.
Long Reach residents can submit absentee ballots and Town Center offers secure online voting. Oakland Mills residents won’t vote at all this year because its village bylaws don’t require an election when races are uncontested.
Hickory Ridge’s voting window is three hours long Saturday, while Kings Contrivance’s polls are open Friday evening and for several hours Saturday.
By contrast, for government elections, Howard County offers eight days of early voting, from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. daily; mail-in and drop box voting; and the opportunity to vote in person over those same hours on election day.
“It’s shocking to me how few people have any idea of how it works, and part of it is because it’s complicated,” said Joan Lancos, a former village board and Columbia Association board member for Hickory Ridge.
Lancos has been active in the association’s elections since the 1980s and has tried many gimmicks to get people to the polls — from jelly bean-counting contests and gift basket giveaways to flea markets. She spent the past year trying to recruit candidates in Hickory Ridge, but just two people are running for five open seats.
Some have suggested that Columbia should formally incorporate as a municipality, but Lancos said that would raise complex questions about city boundaries, taxes, garbage collection and road maintenance.
Villages might improve turnout if they changed their rules, Lancos said, but it takes “a huge percentage of property owners to vote” in order to change bylaws.
“It’s a very odd setup and how to fix it, I don’t know,” she said.
Tracking turnout
Understanding the problem’s scope is difficult because no one consistently tracks the association’s voter participation. The Columbia Maryland Archives, housed in the association’s headquarters, built an online exhibit to showcase voter turnout since the inception of village board elections. However, data for some years was unavailable.
When asked for voter turnout data, a Columbia Association spokeswoman directed questions to local blogger Jeremy Dommu, who runs The Merriweather Post.
Dommu moved to Hickory Ridge village in 2019 and has tracked turnout and results for the last six board elections. Unlike for public elections in Maryland, the results weren’t available to residents until he published them on his Substack page.
As a former Hickory Ridge village board member, Dommu said getting involved offers an opportunity “to ensure the small fraction of money the Columbia Association passes back to each village is used to bring the community together.”
Still, Dommu, Sullivan and Lancos said people tend to get involved only after something goes wrong.
The final year Dommu ran for the Hickory Ridge board, in 2023, drew an unusually high number of candidates — some campaigning in favor of and others against a redevelopment plan for the aging village center. That year, 707 of the village’s 13,000 residents voted, leaving the center in limbo.
That same year, some residents called for a recall of Columbia Association board members to prevent them from ousting then-President and CEO Lakey Boyd after she prioritized equity, diversity and inclusion. They argued that the entirely white board did not represent the diversity of Columbia, which was founded as a model of racial and socioeconomic integration.
Last year, Wilde Lake became embroiled in scandal after a controversial husband and wife duo on the village board criticized the governance and wanted to investigate the 2024 elections. Amid complaints that the board was paralyzed by infighting, board chair Katharine Rathbun and her husband, Edward Richards, resigned in February. Now, for the first time in years, Wilde Lake has a contested village board election with seven residents running for five seats.
State Sen. Clarence Lam, who began his political career as a village board member in Harper’s Choice, said it’s been a decades-long challenge to get Columbia residents to run for and vote in these hyperlocal elections.
“I think what we saw in Wilde Lake really highlights the fact that you can have a lot of disruption and chaos where an election does not really reflect the will of the community,” Lam said.
Increasing transparency
State lawmakers have floated measures to reform Columbia’s elections to increase transparency for voters.
Del. Jen Terrasa, who represents Howard County and once served on the Columbia Association’s elections committee, noticed that expensive campaign mailers were getting delivered all over the community in 2021.
Rumors swirled that a developer was bankrolling a slate of candidates. Because Columbia is a private entity, candidates aren’t required to disclose where they get donations, unlike candidates for county and state offices.
“There was money pouring into it, and that’s fine,” Terrasa said. “But people have a right to know who decided that was a good investment.”
The following year, she sponsored a bill in the General Assembly that would have required candidates in elections for homeowners associations and other types of communities to file reports detailing donations and disbursements with the State Board of Elections.
Representatives for River Hill and Kings Contrivance, as well as the democracy advocacy organization Common Cause Maryland, testified in favor of the measure, citing worries about developer influence in such races.
Opponents included the Maryland Building Industry Association and the Maryland Office of the Attorney General, which argued that the bill raised “serious constitutional questions” and increased the state’s administrative burden.
The bill died. In 2024, Terrasa introduced a narrower measure that aimed to make campaign donations in Columbia’s races public.
This time, some villages resisted. Town Center’s board submitted testimony arguing that the measure “usurps our authority as a civic organization to determine our own guidelines and policies on elections.”
“Nothing is broken: why are you adding more burden, oversight, and disclosure?” the testimony stated.
In the end, Terrasa couldn’t get the measure passed.
So as Columbia’s elections commence once again Saturday, there will be black-eyed Susans and bounce houses — since democracy isn’t enough of a draw.
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