Strengthen our local elections
By Lisa Sweeney-Miran & Nicole Speer, published in the Daily Camera:
Democracy is strongest when everyone votes. When neighbors talk to neighbors on the sidewalk, when public spaces are filled with people advocating for their vision of the future, and when everyone who can vote does vote, we build governments that represent us and that strengthen our communities. This is why we support Boulder’s transition to even year city council elections. We hope you will, too.
Ninety percent of Boulder’s registered voters turned out in the 2020 election, when we elected federal and state leaders. By contrast, only forty-nine percent of Boulder’s registered voters turned out in the 2021 election, when we elected our local leaders.
These differences in turnout weren’t only in the races at the top of the ballot. Turnout for local ballot measures averaged seventy-nine percent in 2020, but only forty-five percent in 2021.
The shocking gap in turnout on even the most mundane local issues between the 2020 and 2021 elections is not a new problem. A recent analysis showed that over our past ten city elections, an average of 17,239 more Boulder residents voted on local ballot issues in even-year elections. (https://boulderbeat.news/2022/05/12/even-year-elections/).
Our city’s dramatically lower turnout in off-cycle local elections is not an anomaly. The significant impact of election timing on voter turnout is the reason a growing number of cities are changing their local elections to even years to align with state and federal elections.
Various methods have been proposed for increasing turnout in local elections, but election turnout experts agree: there is simply nothing that has as massive an impact on voter participation in local elections as shifting the timing of local elections to align with midterm and presidential elections. (https://www.nationalcivicleague.org/ncr-article/increasing-voter-turnout-in-local-elections/)
Recent research is showing that who turns out to vote in local elections is also influenced by election timing. In odd-year elections communities disproportionately lose the input of residents who are lower-income, people of color, and those who rent their homes.
https://electionlab.mit.edu/articles/who-votes-city-election-timing-and-composition-voters
We are fortunate to live in Colorado, where our ballots arrive in the mail, we can register on the same day as elections, and we have ballot drop boxes all over our counties. But 15,000-20,000 voters are still left out of Boulder’s city council elections. We can do better, and we must do better, if we are to have local leaders who represent our whole community.
Our democracy is under threat. Many of the rights that we believed were guaranteed have recently been called into question. We know that democracy is stronger when more of us participate in electing our leaders. We must do all that we can to ensure that our elections are representative and that our voters are empowered.
As a community, we don’t get the opportunity to make big, structural changes in other parts of the country. But we can implement those changes here at home. There are over 17,000 reasons to follow best practices for increased voter turnout by electing local leaders when we elect our state and federal leaders. As elected leaders, we would welcome the opportunity to run for office in a year when so many more members of our community will have a voice in our election.
We hope you will join us in supporting Boulder’s transition to even-year city council elections, and we hope more cities, counties, and districts across our state will follow Boulder’s lead.
Lisa Sweeney-Miran is the Vice President of the Boulder Valley School District Board of Education and Nicole Speer is a member of Boulder City Council.