Turnout low for City Council election
The turnout percentage dropped 18 percent from last year.
Published April 9, 2009
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Election judges wait to sign in voters at the Christian Chapel Academy during Tuesday's municipal election. Turnout for the election, which includes decisions on two City Council and Board of Education seats, was just more than 10 percent, one of the lowest counts ever.
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After a record-high turnout in last November's presidential election, Boone County voters set new lows Tuesday in the elections to vote on, among others, two Columbia City Council seats and two Columbia Public School Board representatives.
According to the Boone County Clerk's Office, only 10,503 of the county's 104,140 registered voters cast ballots, or 10.1 percent. This figure represents a sharp drop from the 2008 municipal elections, when 28 percent of registered voters went to the polls or voted by mail.
MU College Democrats President Brian Roach said he believes the low turnout was because of the lack of students living in the Second and Sixth wards.
"There were only two specific races for the City Council, and a lot of the students on campus live in the First Ward, which wasn't up for election," Roach said.
Many students live in the Sixth Ward, which includes East Campus and Bearfield, but students living on campus are covered in the First Ward, which had an election last year.
Boone County Clerk Wendy Noren said turnout is always low in April elections the year after a presidential race, and the relatively low number of issues on the ballot kept some voters away.
"This time around, 80 percent of eligible Columbia voters could only vote for the school board," she said. "The greater the number of issues, the greater the turnout."
Noren said her office followed regular procedures to advertise the election to the public, but did no special advertising to inform voters of the positions at stake. She said turnout could be higher if local media made a greater effort to publicize the election.
"Television stations always ask why voter turnout is so low," she said. "My response to them is, 'Why didn't you tell anyone about it?'"
Roach also said local off-season elections do not generate as much interest as major national and statewide races.
"It is not as exciting to vote in a City Council election as a presidential election, and they traditionally have low turnouts," Roach said.
Roach, whose group canvassed for Sixth Ward winner Barbara Hoppe, said there are structural problems with the youth vote in Missouri, and it is difficult to register students.
In order to reduce costs during the recession, Noren said the County Clerk's office cut back on the number of polling places available throughout the city, and utilized election judges who already were trained so they would not have to finance additional sessions for poll workers to learn the process.
