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.