Who's not voting in Durham?

Our most recent Durham municipal election occurred on November 3, 2015, when Bill Bell was re-elected as mayor and three city council seats were filled, one by incumbent Steve Schewel and two by newcomers Jillian Johnson and Charlie Reece. In this election, about 19,352 ballots were cast, yielding a dismal voter turnout of around 10.7 percent, which is somewhat reflective of the past voter turnout for Durham municipal elections. For comparison, the official voter turnout in Durham for last year’s senatorial election was 44.6 percent, and was 69.4 percent for 2012’s presidential election.

The low voter turnout does not only point to a problem in how people view municipal elections, but it also constitutes a problem in the validity of the election itself. With a 10 percent voter turnout, my vote effectively counts ten times more than it would have if all eligible voters had shown up at the polls. Who am I to say I know what would be best for me and nine other Durham residents? We have an extremely diverse Durham community in terms of experience, opinion and need, among many other things. That’s something that I’m proud of, but it brings up a troubling issue with low voter turnout: how do we know that the results of the election provide an accurate reflection of the needs of the population if 90 percent of it isn’t voting?

This brings me to my next point: the citizens that do vote often disproportionately represent the voice of certain subsets of the population. It seems intuitive that wealthier, more educated people would be more likely to vote than their disadvantaged counterparts, but after this election, I wanted to see the data. The North Carolina State Board of Elections released unofficial election results broken down by precinct, and these results confirmed my suspicions. Areas of Durham representing wealthier, more educated voters had different preferences than those of the poorer precincts with worse voter turnout, especially when it came to filling the three city council seats. In all of Duke’s precincts (2, 3 and 5), the three council candidates with the most votes were Schewel, Johnson and Reece. Similarly, in some of the wealthiest areas of Durham (precincts 43, 39 and 35.3, with median household incomes of $120-160K/year, as determined by cross-referencing the precinct map to an income level map), the same three candidates were favored. This doesn’t come as a surprise: these three candidates have the most political experience, have been educated at prestigious institutions like Duke, Harvard and Columbia, and have more noticeably liberal, partisan platforms that conform to the Democratic Party. Also unsurprisingly, these are our three newly elected city council members.

In some poorer communities of East and South Durham and near NCCU, we see a slightly different candidate preference. In three of these precincts—52, 41 and 42—Durham native Ricky Hart garnered the most votes, and Johnson and Reece often fell closer to the bottom of the polls. Hart did well in the surrounding precincts, too, coming in second or third throughout the majority of the remainder of East Durham. Hart is an Army veteran and political newcomer who is active in his church and many organizations for the betterment of Durham. While he (like all of the candidates on the ballot in the general election) also identifies as a Democrat, he won my vote with his genuineness, largely nonpartisan nature and insider understanding of the problems that face our most forgotten communities. He knew very well that low voter turnout would be a problem after the primary election in September, when he posted on his Facebook page a comprehensive overview of “Black voter turnout...in some of the largest Black precincts” (most of which were the ones where he polled highest for the general election). “Overall,” he stated, “95 percent chose not to participate in September’s Primary Elections. If you do not exercise your right to vote on Tuesday, Nov. 3, 2015, no one is going to take us serious when complaints come in. No votes means that your voices are not heard.” If the voter turnout had been better throughout this region of Durham, it may have secured him a spot on the council. It’s impossible to tell what would’ve happened if more Durhamites had voted in our municipal election, and that’s exactly the problem.

A few weeks ago I was downtown at a lunch with a homeless man, who, when the subject of voting came up, said emphatically, “Oh no! I don’t vote.” Upon my perhaps overly simplistic insistence that, “You have to vote!” he responded, “No; all I gotta do is stay Black and die. I ain’t gotta do anything else.” We need to mobilize those poor and disadvantaged members of our community—who many of our candidates claim to want to help—and get their input in the political process. For me, that means trying to reach out to the Durham homeless to bring them into a community that will give them the confidence to call Durham home and turn up at the polls. I think we can all as Duke students find a way to play a part, whether through first voting ourselves or through direct outreach to strengthen our community and help others navigate the political process. With wealth should not come political power; that is the whole beauty of democracy. We won’t create the best Durham possible until a significant chunk of those 90 percent who are silent begin voicing their opinions. I suspect that if those in Durham’s poorer communities had adequate representation at the polls, they likely would have chosen the familiar face of Durham-native Ricky Hart, whose campaign was focused on lowering unemployment and improving police-community relations, rather than the loudly-touted Duke alumna, staunch Democrat and Durham-transplant Jillian Johnson, who was favored by many of my peers.

Victoria Treboschi, Trinity '15, is a Research Technician at the Duke Eye Center in the Department of Ophthalmology.