From The District

The VoteTracker

Newark agrees on everything. Princeton fights about everything. Why?

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At a Glance
5
Princeton No-Voters
0
Newark No Votes (Ever)
25%
Environmental Dissent
Key Finding
Princeton\u2019s five-member resistance bloc has voted no 95 times and yes twice. Newark\u2019s council has never recorded a single dissenting vote. Same state, opposite cultures.

In Newark, the city council agrees on everything. Literally everything. Councilman Eddie Osborne has cast 119 votes. Not one was “no.” His colleague Luis Quintana: 116 votes, zero dissent. The entire Newark delegation votes in lockstep.

Princeton’s council operates differently. Mark Freda has voted against 26 consecutive proposals. Dawn Mount: 21. Dave Cohen: 17. Five officials, 95 no votes, 2 yes votes total.

Newark’s unanimity could reflect genuine consensus—or a council that makes its real decisions before the public meeting. Princeton’s resistance could reflect principled opposition to overdevelopment—or wealthy homeowners protecting property values. The voting records alone can’t tell us. But they tell us where to look.

The Unanimity

Newark’s Perfect Record

Newark’s city council hasn’t recorded a single dissenting vote in our dataset. Seven officials. Hundreds of votes. Zero “no.”

Eddie Osborne leads with 119 consecutive yes votes. Luis Quintana follows with 116. Carlos Gonzalez: 66. The entire delegation votes in perfect alignment on every recorded matter.

Newark’s unanimity has several plausible explanations. The city employs professional staff who vet proposals in committee—if problems get fixed before the public meeting, votes become formalities. Chicago’s council operated this way for decades under Daley and Emanuel; UIC researchers called it a “rubber stamp” until Lightfoot’s tenure brought divided roll calls. One-party dominance may also suppress visible dissent—Newark is a Democratic stronghold where bucking consensus carries political risk.

The data can’t distinguish between these explanations. But they point local reporters toward the right questions.

0No votes recorded across entire Newark council
The Resistance

Princeton’s Five-Member Bloc

Princeton is one of America’s wealthiest towns. Median household income exceeds $150,000. Home values routinely top $1 million. And five members of its local government have made careers of voting no.

Mark Freda: 26 votes, all against. Dawn Mount: 21 votes, all against. Dave Cohen: 17 votes, all against. Between them, Leticia Fraga and Mia Sacks add another 31 no votes and just 2 yes votes.

What are they opposing? The most visible flashpoint is the Stockton Street development—a proposed 238-unit apartment complex on Princeton Theological Seminary land, near Albert Einstein’s former home. Critics point out that only 48 units would be affordable; the other 190 are market-rate. The Princeton Coalition for Responsible Development, led by former councilwoman Jo Butler, has filed three lawsuits against the project.

The resistance has competing explanations. Wealthy homeowners may be protecting property values—Princeton sits within commuting distance of New York, and the “affordable housing” framing covers what is mostly a market-rate luxury project. But critics make a different argument: developers are gaming state mandates. New Jersey requires municipalities to build affordable housing; the 20% affordable requirement becomes a “shoehorn” for projects that don’t fit. Princeton historian Sean Wilentz called Stockton Street “a city-sized private housing development on the oldest residential neighborhood in Princeton.”

The voting records show an organized opposition bloc. Housing is the battleground. What the records can’t show is which interpretation is correct.

OfficialLocationYesNoRate
Mark FredaPrinceton, NJ0260%
Dawn M. MountPrinceton, NJ0210%
Dave CohenPrinceton, NJ0170%
Leticia FragaPrinceton, NJ1175.6%
Mia SacksPrinceton, NJ1146.7%
The Contested

Where Dissent Actually Appears

Strip out the routine administrative votes—renaming streets, approving minutes, ceremonial resolutions—and a different picture emerges. Of the 3,073 substantive votes on policy matters, approval drops to 93.8%.

Environmental matters see the most dissent: 75% approval, a full 22 points below the baseline. One in four environmental votes draws a no. Budget votes (92.6%) also show genuine debate.

The takeaway: when the stakes are real, officials disagree. The 96.5% headline figure is inflated by procedural consent.

Environmental36 votes
75%
Budget571 votes
92.6%
Residential393 votes
94.9%
Commercial348 votes
95.5%
Infrastructure1,248 votes
95.4%
Zoning477 votes
96%
Excludes 13,132 administrative votes (97.1% approval) — routine matters like meeting minutes and ceremonial items.
The Pattern

What the Votes Reveal

Voting records don’t explain motives. They reveal patterns. Newark’s unanimity could be healthy consensus; it could be something else. Princeton’s resistance bloc could be principled skepticism; it could be NIMBYism.

What the data does is point. It identifies where the interesting questions are. Why does one New Jersey council never disagree while another fights over every proposal? Why does environmental policy divide officials when budgets and zoning pass easily?

These are questions for local reporters. The voting records are the map.

Methodology

How We Built This Dataset

Data Source: Voting records from Legistar, the municipal government software used by hundreds of U.S. cities. We extracted individual roll-call votes and linked them to person records.

Officials Included: We tracked 1,524 officials who cast at least 3 votes on development-related matters. This threshold ensures a minimum sample while including part-time and recently-elected officials. Officials with fewer than 20 votes should be interpreted with caution—their rates may change significantly with additional data.

Topic Classification: Votes were categorized by topic using matter type classifications from each municipality. We distinguish between administrative votes (meeting minutes, ceremonial items, routine approvals—13,132 votes at 97.1% approval) and substantivevotes (budget, zoning, environmental, residential, commercial, infrastructure—3,073 votes at 93.8% approval). The analysis focuses on substantive votes where policy disagreement is meaningful.

Approval Rate: Calculated as (Yes Votes) / (Yes Votes + No Votes). Abstentions are excluded from the denominator.

Polarization Index: For councils with 3+ tracked officials, we calculated the difference between the highest and lowest individual approval rates.

Selection Bias: Our dataset only includes cities that use Legistar and publish machine-readable roll-call votes. This over-represents larger cities with sophisticated record-keeping and excludes municipalities using other systems. The cities in our analysis self-selected by having accessible data infrastructure.

Limitations: Some cities don’t record roll-call votes for routine matters. Vote counts may include procedural votes alongside substantive ones. The sources cited validate that housing and development debates are active in these cities, but do not independently verify individual vote tallies—those come directly from Legistar records.

Date Range: Records span 2023 through January 2025, with most data from 2024.

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Sources & Data

All claims in this article are grounded in public records, government data, and independent reporting.

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