All the Channel Islands are peculiar in their own ways, but Sark is particularly peculiar. Considered a crown dependency, though by and large independent of Britain, Sark has no cars, income tax, unemployment or social security.

There is one jail cell, rarely occupied. The only way to get here is by boat, weather permitting. People travel on the alternately dusty and muddy roads by bicycle and in horse-drawn carts, goods are transported by tractor, and every year the seigneur pays the queen a sum equal to one-twentieth of a knight’s service fee: £1.79, or about $2.65.

Until now, the legislature, known as Chief Pleas, has been made up mostly of the owners of the island’s 40 plots of land, called tenements (pronounced tai-ne-MONT, in a vaguely Norman French way). This year, however, the legislature voted to replace itself with a fully elected 28-seat body. Wednesday’s election will decide its makeup.

But the happy shift to democracy has been marred by extraordinary amounts of bad blood and ill will, reflected in the candidates running for Chief Pleas. On one side are the people who feel that Sark, in all its sleepy friendliness, should be left to make its own decisions as it always has, albeit now with democracy. The other side supports the development plans of a pair of reclusive identical-twin British billionaires who have bought up more than one-fifth of Sark in the last few years and feel its future should include paved roads, cars and a helicopter landing pad.

The pair, David and Frederick Barclay, also own the Ritz Hotel in London and The Daily Telegraph newspaper, among other things. In 1993, they bought Brecqhou, a 200-acre island next to Sark, from Sark for a reported £2.33 million, or about $3.5 million. (They had to pay a 13th of the price, known as a treizième, to the seigneur, a practice they found irksome; the custom has since been abolished.)