The Durham municipal elections last week saw a 10.49 percent turnout among 174,361 registered voters in the county. Michael Perry, director of the Durham County Board of Elections, attributed this number to a lack of interest in elections that are not in a presidential year nor a midterm election. He noted that this year's turnout is actually an increase from the last time a noncontroversial election occurred.
“Voting and elections have been in the news a lot more recently,” Perry said. “People are more aware of the elections.”
There were 18,299 votes cast this year, as opposed to 10,204 in 2009 and 22,575 in 2011. A number of issues on the 2011 ballot, Perry said, accounted for the jump in the turnout between 2009 and 2011. In 2011 there were proposed increases in county sales, transit and education taxes on the ballot. These issues were widely publicized and contributed to the relatively higher turnout.
According to data released by the Durham County Board of Elections, the municipal election primaries had a 6.1 percent voter turnout—or 10,535 out of 172,568 people who are registered to vote.
Perry said that he has been speaking to organizations and at events to encourage voting, as well as placing advertisements in local newspapers, but that is the extent of the Board's initiatives.
“We can do better,” he said.
The statewide voter turnout has not yet been released by the North Carolina State Board of Election. Chris Ketchie, policy analyst for the Southern Coalition for Southern Justice, estimated it to be about 14 percent statewide.
The SCSJ, a nonprofit located in Durham aimed at advocating for minorities and the economically disadvantaged, sent out over 50,000 mailers throughout the state that graded people as either “fair,” “good” or “excellent” in their voting history. The fliers also compared residents’ voting histories to averages in their area.
Ketchie called the initiative a “straight-up get-out-the-vote” movement that had been modified from its initial incarnation last year. This year’s mailer featured more friendly and positive language, after SCSJ received negative responses last year from those who received the mailers.
Voters were also concerned about the privacy implications of SCSJ personalizing the cards with people’s specific voter histories over the past few years. Ketchie said that although whom or what people voted for is private, whether they voted at all is public record and accessible to anyone.
Despite this, Ketchie said that research has shown that this type of nonpartisan mailer that employs peer-pressure to encourage people to perform better than their neighbors is more effective than a partisan or impersonal one.
Ketchie said the mailers targeted minorities, such as people of color, single unmarried women and young people ages 18 to 25, all of whom are underrepresented in the voter demographic. Durham County was not one of the counties mailed to, but 15 total counties were targeted in both metropolitan and rural areas, dictated by the prevalence of underrepresented voters.
“[Those voters] are underrepresented more than your typical high-turnout, middle-aged white voter,” he said of the minority groups.
Until more concrete numbers are released, Ketchie said it will be difficult to evaluate if this year's adjusted mailers had an impact. He, like Perry, emphasized the difficulty of attracting voters in the off years when many do not even know that local elections are taking place.
“Local government has a more direct impact [on people’s lives] sometimes than presidential elections,” he said. “It would be better, but it’s just hard to get people out for municipal elections.”
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