Tuesday is election day in Pennsylvania. Local school board candidates, county commissioners and row offices, like coroner, will be on the ballots.
City council candidates and township supervisors are also up for election.
Turnouts for the local elections are typically low.
"The most recent statistic that I saw was about 15 to 27% of eligible voters cast ballots in local elections,” said JoyAnna Hopper, Ph.D., an associate professor of political science at the University of Scranton.
Hopper studies American public policy and administration, specifically at the state level. In Pennsylvania, general elections with federal candidates on the ballot are held in each even numbered year. Municipal elections, like Tuesdays, are held every odd numbered year.
"The local government is so much more likely to affect you on a day to day basis," Hopper said. "We're talking about the stuff that we complain about all the time, potholes, fixing the sidewalks, who's taking care of the parks, zoning questions, questions about permitting, infrastructure questions ... all of these things are things that we deal with on a day to day basis.”
WVIA News looked at turnouts numbers for past elections available on some county's elections offices websites.
In Lackawanna, which includes the city of Scranton, almost 40,000 more people voted in the 2022 election than in the 2021 election. That’s just under the population of Wilkes-Barre.
The difference in turnout is consistent across Northeast Pennsylvania.
In Susquehanna County, almost 9,000 more people voted in 2022 than in 2021. In Pike, 12,453 more registered voters cast ballots in 2022 than in 2021. In Carbon, almost 20,000 more ballots were cast in 2022 than in 2021.
The reasons for low turnout fits into three categories, said Hopper, who is also the director of the university’s Center for Ethics and Excellence in Public Service.
"There are barriers, competition and exposure," she said. "Some of these are things that affect elections across the board. Some of them are going to be things that are going to be uniquely problematic for local elections.”
Those unique to local elections are competition and exposure, including whether or not voters believe their ballot even matters, especially if one party has been historically dominant in an area, said Hopper.
"Anybody who is not in the majority party, oftentimes might think ‘well, why should I bother?’ ‘why should I turn out to vote if the same thing is gonna keep happening?’,” she said.
Those registered in the majority party face similar questions.
“Which is, ‘why should I show up? It's going to happen regardless of whether I show up in support at all’,” she said.
Exposure is also a big issue in local elections.
"If you've got 10 to 12, sometimes in places up to 20 different offices on a ballot that people are voting for, that is an extraordinary amount of information for someone to collect and understand in order to feel comfortable walking into a voting booth and voting," Hopper said.
She pointed to the amount of news coverage local elections receive. Local media covers local, state and national level issues while national media often doesn’t cover local issues.
“So the amount of media that's out there that is focused on national issues is just massive in comparison to what you're getting at the local level,” she said.
Local media also doesn’t have the resources to cover everything.
"What you end up with in local elections are situations where the people who have the time and resources to dedicate to really figuring these things out and keeping track of all of these offices in local politics, they're the ones that usually turn out to vote," she said.
So not only is voter turnout low, but Hopper said those who are voting are often from a certain group that tend to have high incomes and are over the age of 65. She said those voters are not representative of the entire community.
"When you have such a small group that is ultimately making the decisions about who's going to represent us ... it's not democratic," she said.
The population of Lackawanna County in 2021 was 215,663. There were 144,467 registered voters that year with only 51,689 ballots cast, according to the county election office. And that was a general election year.
Around 38,389 people lived in Susquehanna County in 2021. That year there were 26,672 registered voters and of those registered, only 32% cast votes, according to the county’s election office.
There are solutions. Hopper said elections need more consistency and certainty.
One reform could be to change the timing of local elections to be held at the same time as the general elections, she said.
“So that people are already engaged and ready to go to the polls," she said. "And they're in that mindset. They're having a lot of exposure to politics at the time.”
Removing some of the barriers that impact both general and municipal elections could help with turn out, she said.
“Things like allowing mail-in ballots, same-day registration, convenient polling locations and hours,” she said. “Maybe … election day, not happening during the middle of the week, or at least extending hours to where people who work at different times would actually have the time, at any point, to vote.”
Providing transportation to the polls is another solution.
“A lot of those decisions are made at the state level, but local communities can still lobby the state to adopt measures that are going to make voting easier for everyone,” she said.
Ultimately, finding ways to educate and inform voters about candidates could increase turnout.
“It should be impossible for people living in a community to not know an election is happening,” she said. “There should be information everywhere. And that's difficult to do … because it relies on media, it relies on organizations to get that information out there.”
People require education to make decisions at the polls, especially at the local level because of the amount of offices, she said.
For example, if you live in Milford Borough, the Pike County seat, there are 15 different offices on Tuesday's ballot, including Pike County Commissioners, Delaware Valley School District directors, county auditor, three state judge seats and borough council.
“The information is not maybe as exciting to people as what's happening at the federal level,” she said. “So we have to find ways to encourage organizations in media to really focus on educating people about their local government.”
There is a nationalization of local politics, Hopper said, when rather residents need to know what candidates plan to do at the local level.
“Everything is becoming so focused on national politics, and that allows for local governments to act without the level of accountability that should exist in a democracy,” she said. “Because if we're all paying attention to national politics, and we're not voting in local elections ... then who is holding local government accountable? … it's not good for democracy to have voter turnout rates that are this low.”
