Low voter turnout mirrors low voter morale

There’s a clear line to draw between the low voter turnout throughout Campbell County and the lack of candidates who turned out for public office.

This week the county saw its lowest voter turnout in a primary election since 2012, with fewer than 7,500 ballots cast between early ballots and Election Day votes. That pales in comparison to the last primary when nearly 12,500 people turned in ballots.

Meanwhile, there were fewer than 20 candidates split between six seats in the Legislature, two spots on the County Commission and three City Council wards.

What that equated to was four uncontested House races, a lackluster voting pool and a relatively quiet Election Day at the polls. It’s fair to wonder whether that lack of interest and variety of candidates translated to the electorate.

It’s important not to mistake correlation for causation, but we are talking politics after all, in which case we’ve all been conditioned to believe that the only true measure of the validity of a point made is whether it supports your own argument.

So, what’s to blame?

Could it be that the heightened political interest that took off in the Trump era has come back down to Earth?

There’s the obvious possibility that it’s just a primary being a primary, which will always draw fewer voters than the general. But that doesn’t explain such a stark drop-off from the last one. Especially in a community and state where the primary plays such an outsize role.

If an informed electorate is an engaged electorate, then maybe the onus falls on voters to take more interest in their local races. But it’s hard to blame anyone who’s tuned out the noisiness of national, state and even local politics in recent years.

All this political rhetoric telling people what not to do, and why not to vote for a candidate, couldn’t have helped the cause.

Would an undecided voter finding a mailbox full of ads attacking an opponent, rather than laying out reasons to support a given candidate, feel more or less inspired to head to the polls?

The answer to that seems clear.

Regardless of the outcome of any of these races, the fact that so few people bothered to take part in them reflects poorly on not only the options they had to choose from, but the political careers of the ones elected.

Competition is good. Encouraging cake walks into office benefits no one, least of all the democratic process as a whole. But it’s not the fault of those who run that others don’t race against them.

We need people more tuned in and holding officials accountable throughout their political terms. Not having the drive to care during the election itself isn’t a good sign.

There’s time to reverse this trend in the general election. After that, there’s a brand new set of terms to hold officials accountable throughout.

Credit goes to the 7,000-plus who played their role in the democratic process. But we need more from the thousands who sat this one out, and more candidates to step up, giving the rightfully uninspired something to vote for.