About 40 people crowded into Coogan Pavilion in Edgewood Park on Sunday as Westville Ward 25 Democrats met to hear from candidates for elected office and argue over how the ward’s voice should be carried into this week’s party endorsement meeting. The question at the center of the gathering was whether the ward would again let all of its committee members vote and have its co-chairs cast the endorsement ballots based on that result.

The decision matters because the New Haven Democratic Town Committee is set to meet Thursday to endorse a candidate for the 92nd District state representative seat, a contest involving three Democrats who all live in Ward 25: incumbent State Rep. Patricia Dillon and challengers Eli Sabin and Justin Farmer. The district covers parts of Amity, Westville, Edgewood, Dwight, West River and the Hill, and it is the city’s most contested state legislative race this year.

Ward 25’s role has long carried unusual weight in city politics. The ward has usually turned out more voters than the other 29 wards in New Haven, and in six elections since 2013 it has held a vote among all committee members, then had its co-chairs vote for the candidate chosen by that tally. Ward 7’s Democratic committee has used the same approach. Sabin supporters pressed Sunday for a binding vote, arguing it would preserve what they see as the ward’s democratic tradition.

“We were the only one in the city that did that. It was a point of pride that we did it that way,” said Nicholas Neeley, one of the supporters pushing for the vote. Former Alder Ina Silverman then handed co-chair Adam Marchand a bag holding three pieces of paper and three pens, saying, “I made up three pieces of paper with three pens,” in an effort to keep the voting process alive.

But co-chairs Janis Underwood and Marchand said there would not be a vote this year. Underwood said the formal binding vote is not a “tradition” but rather one of the ways the ward has conducted the process in the past, and said there was not enough time to plan a vote this year. Marchand shut down Silverman’s improvised effort with a blunt, “I won’t do that.”

The dispute exposed a familiar fault line in local party politics: whether procedure is a safeguard for democracy or just a custom that can be set aside when time runs short. For Ward 25 Democrats, that answer now arrives just as the city’s endorsement machinery moves toward Thursday and the only three Democrats in the race are all neighbors in the same ward.