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Following suit with other towns in the Triangle, Apex is considering moving from odd-year mayoral and city council elections to even-year ones—an attractive prospect, given the potential for nearly six-figure savings and increased voter turnout.
If Apex makes the change, it would align the town’s elections with county, state and federal elections, allowing for cost-sharing with the county, having the races all on one ballot, and reducing voters’ trips to the polls. Apex is Wake County’s third largest municipality, with a population of about 85,000.
The Apex Town Council passed a resolution at its May 28 meeting to explore the “feasibility” of switching to even-year elections and encourage other Wake County municipalities to do the same. Currently, the only Wake County municipality in the even-year boat is Raleigh. Though Apex council members seemed optimistic about the change, they made no formal decision, and no vote was scheduled.
When Raleigh made the even-year switch in 2024, it saw a 61% decrease in election spending, according to a presentation Wake County Board of Elections (BOE) Director Olivia McCall gave at the Apex council meeting. In 2019, the Wake County BOE charged Raleigh about $834,000 to run its municipal elections, and in 2024, after the city made the switch, expenses decreased to about $325,000.
Raleigh’s voter turnout also jumped about 10%, Wake County BOE Secretary Gerry Cohen told the council. But in what could be seen as a trade-off, local races appear lower on a longer ballot, after federal, state, and county races.
A smaller township than Raleigh, Apex paid more than $150,000 for municipal elections in 2025 and more than $200,000 in 2023. If Apex saw the same 61% spending decrease as Raleigh did, switching to even years could look like saving nearly $100,000 compared to election spending in the 2025–26 fiscal year.
“In a budget cycle where we’re scrounging for every dollar, that starts to sound pretty appealing,” Mayor Pro Tempore Terry Mahaffey said at the meeting.
By switching to even years, Apex would end up spending less because it would share election expenses—poll workers, equipment, sites, advertising, early voting, and ballots—with Wake County. Plus, the more municipalities in Wake that hold even-year elections, the less expensive even-year elections would be due to the cost-sharing—hence Apex’s resolution urging other Wake towns to consider switching.
Conversely, if more Wake municipalities switch to even years, Mahaffey added, it becomes more expensive for towns to continue to hold odd-year elections, adding pressure to act relatively soon. But McCall told Apex’s council she had not been invited to present to other Wake municipalities about switching election cycles, and the Apex council members did not seem inclined to rush to make the change for Apex’s impending 2027 election.
As recently as 2010, only four municipalities in North Carolina…
