Tuesday, November 12, 2013

2013 Election Results

This blog post did not go in the direction I expected. I thought I would write up a quick analysis of this year's election results. I thought I would comment on the remarkably low number of votes received by the Republican and Independent Mayoral candidates as indicative of specific problems with their campaign strategies.

Instead, I decided to find out just how much the voter turnout has really declined over the years, and how long this has been going on. What I found was stunning. If voter turnout continues to decline at the same rate that it's declined over the past fifty years, in another decade the only people who will vote in Waterbury's municipal elections are the candidates, members of the Town Committees, and their immediate circles of friends and family.

If we don't change what we're doing, in ten years our voter turnout could be reduced to maybe 3,000 people.

That sounds extreme, but take a look at the table below, and you'll see why it might be reality.

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Year
Mayor Elected
Party
Total Voter Turnout
Total Voter Turnout Percent
1961
Bergin
Democrat
48,195
unknown
1967
Palomba
Republican
41,386
unknown
1975
Bergin
Democrat
37,481
unknown
1979
Bergin
Democrat
32,268
unknown
1981
Bergin
Democrat
33,168
unknown
1983
Bergin
Democrat
29,669
unknown
1985
Santopietro
Republican
32,311
unknown
1991
Bergin
Democrat
32,496
unknown
1995
Giordano
Republican
29,619
unknown
1997
Giordano
Republican
25,164
unknown
1999
Giordano
Republican
22,097
unknown
2001
Jarjura
Democrat
24,323
50.3%
2003
Jarjura
Democrat
19,660
38.8%
2005
Jarjura
Democrat
21,130
40.6%
2007
Jarjura
Democrat
16,429
32.4%
2009
Jarjura
Dem/Rep
13,399
24%
2011
O’Leary
Democrat
17,104
30.9%
2013
O’Leary
Democrat
12,763
22.6%

Election results were pulled from the City of Waterbury Registrar's webpage, from the Connecticut Secretary of State's Election Results Archive webpage, and, for years prior to 1999, from various newspaper articles. For the years prior to 2001, my data is incomplete. I hope to eventually fill in the blanks.

This is a problem that goes beyond party lines, beyond the failings of any particular campaign. All three parties need to come together to reverse the steady decline in Waterbury's voter turnout.

Before we do anything, we need to find out why people aren't voting. We can't sit around guessing at why they didn't vote. We need to know the real reasons. This will take some work. Probably the best way to go is to survey every registered voter who didn't vote. This will require some serious funding. There might be a national organization that can help.

I suspect that the solution to the low turnout will require even more work. The three parties need to do a better job of connecting with the voters, of making them feel like they are part of the system, that their voices and their votes count. But that's just speculation. We won't know for certain how to solve the problem until we find out why 40,000 people did not vote this year.

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