A Look At Local Election Results
Voter turnout in the City of St. Louis was an impressive 72.8%! That figure is a bit misleading though, 72.8% of registered voters cast ballots on Tuesday, a total of 142,042, but not every ballot voted on every item. I personally didn’t vote in those races with only one candidate (ex: Circuit Attorney), others did the same.
Here is a list of how many voters did not vote on citywide races:
- President: 456
- Senate: 1,754
- Governor: 3,052
- Lt. Governor: 5,081
- Secretary of State: 5,935
- State Treasurer: 6,199
- Attorney General: 5,251
- US Rep Dist 1: 5,802
- Circuit Attorney: 18,541
- Public Administrator: 11,067
- Sheriff: 10,173
- Treasurer: 8,824
- Amendment 3: 13,748 (change current nonpartisan judge process)
- Proposition A: 8,003 (local control of St. Louis police)
- Proposition B: 5,534 (increase cigarette tax)
- Proposition E: 11,032 (prohibit healthcare exchanges)
- Proposition R: 13,459 (reduce Board of Aldermen)
So 456 people took the time to vote but didn’t pick a presidential ticket? The fewest ballots cast were in the race for Circuit Attorney. Competitive races get higher participation. Hopefully, in a decade, when we have 14 wards instead of our current 28 there will be increased competition.
Tuesday night when I was at Sen. Claire McCaskill’s watch party at the Chase I checked local results on the KMOV iPhone app, I tweeted the following image that I’d taken as a screen capture.
Oh no, Prop R is going down big time, not just failing to get the 60% approval necessary to change the charter. Very quickly I got replies saying the results from other sources showed the opposite. In the end 65.9% of registered voters weighed in on this important change to city governance. But I’m bugged that 13,459 voters, 14.5% of registered voters, didn’t take the time to make a decision. Though if they had Proposition R might have failed!
But it passed with 61.49% of the vote, just over the 60% needed. So a decade from now you’ll see some real change start to happen.Will the 2020 census record yet another decline in population? Would making the reduction in the number of aldermen have sent a message to young progressives to stay in St. Louis, that we can change? We’ll never know the answer to that last question.
— Steve Patterson
Many voters are clueless about many down-ballot issues and candidates. Some, like my wife, won’t vote, at all, on races or issues where they’re uninformed. Others will vote for purely superficial reasons – they like one candidate’s name more than another, they think males are better than females (or vice versa), one candidate is in the “right” party, they vote “no” on every issue, etc, etc. Others will assume that a major party candidate will win easily and will vote for a minor candidate “to send a message”. Still others want to vote “none of the above” or “I hate that guy” and will vote for someone, anyone else.
Bigger picture, on the presidential results, you raise an interesting question. Did these people actually not vote at all? Or, were there technical issues where their votes were either not recorded or not tabulated? Or is this a statistical anomaly, where votes for very-minor candidates and/or write-in votes simply aren’t listed? The reality, in our current two-party (or, in the city, one-party) system, voting for someone other than a major-party candidate, means essentially throwing your vote away. I’d love to vote for Libertarian Party candidates, but that would also mean that there would be one less vote for a Democratic candidate in a tight race against a Republican. Bottom line, every vote counts.
The turnout numbers are nice. Nice to see folks interested enough in their Government to be involved.
It’s abstaining from the Senate vote I don’t get. As JZ71 said, every vote counts. Had Akin won my wife and all of her friends (perhaps all women in Missouri) would have likely lit their torches and grabbed there pitchforks. I’m very happy that Missouri decided not to support a man who thinks my wife “wants it,” doesn’t understand basic biology and believes the world was created in 6 days.