The editors of the Chicago Tribune take a tack similar to the one I have:
Since Brandon Johnson’s victory over Paul Vallas in the mayoral runoff Tuesday, pundits of every stripe have been trumpeting their post-race take on how a little-known Cook County commissioner crafted the right ground game and campaign playbook to defeat a household name in Chicago politics and governance.
But there’s another election post-mortem that needs exploration — one that is deeply disturbing, given the weighty challenges in store for our magnificent, troubled city.
Voter turnout in the mayoral runoff was a mere 35.98%. Out of the city’s 1,587,153 registered voters, only 571,095 Chicagoans made the effort to cast ballots. That means more than a million registered voters opted not to weigh in on one of the most crucial decisions they could make as Chicagoans.
As disheartening as that is, we’re not at all surprised. Over the last 20 years, usually a little more than a third of registered voters have cast ballots in either the city’s first round or runoff elections, according to the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners. Only twice in the last two decades did turnout top 40% — during the April 2015 runoff when Rahm Emanuel beat Jesús “Chuy†GarcÃa, and in first round voting in February 2011, when Emanuel was first elected.
They suggest a number of reasons for the low turnout (weather, confusion, etc.) but finally settle on apathy. I’d like to suggest a couple they didn’t mention.
One of them is that Chicago might have 1.5 million registered voters without actually having that number of voters. Those registered may have moved or even died.
But my preferred if that’s the right word for it explanation is despair. They don’t think that it mattered which candidate got elected. The same old stuff would keep going on cf. “ComEd Four” most of it bad.
This thread centers on Chicago’s mayoral race and why there was such a
low voter turnout. However, I think this race is simply a template for what the entire country is experiencing in their local, state and federal election cycles.
People, for the most part, don’t feel their vote matters much anymore, especially in lieu of how loosely run and politically influenced elections appear to be. For example a huge plurality, if not majority, have doubts the 2020 election was on the up-and-up. The exorbitant amount of democrat money expenditures from donors like Zuckerberg, Soros, the unions far outdistanced their rivals. The many election irregularities – the changing and weakening of election laws, as well as untoward events observed by poll watchers —- were mocked by partisan democrats and dismissed by most courts, through mostly process technicalities, before the evidence could even be reviewed. When the 2022 midterms rolled around many of the same irregularities occurred, especially in AZ, and were once again dismissed or simply ignored. Katie Hobbs just vetoed a signature verification law, amidst other forms of obstruction being encountered in processing ongoing lawsuits questioning the outcome of that election.
Consequently it all seems so futile these days, as the powers that be appear to have enough manipulative power to decide who they want to be mayor, congressperson, governor, or president. Why vote when elections have become machine generated, ballot-harvested, and predetermined by “others,†and not the people?
” Why vote when elections have become machine generated, ballot-harvested, and predetermined by “others,†and not the people?”
Ok, what would you do to fix the problem, please be specific?