This past Tuesday was Election Day.
While it was an “off year” election, one which had no Presidential or Congressional races, the offices being filled were nevertheless important.
Syracuse chose its fifty-fourth Mayor from a field of four candidates.
It also selected three new members to the nine member Common Council. Two were the result of term limits and the other because the incumbent declined to seek re-election.
Despite the importance of these offices to city residents, only thirty-five percent of city voters eligible to vote exercised their franchise.
It was the second worst turnout in the City’s history.
In 2013 the turnout was a measly twenty-four percent but, to be fair to voters, it should be noted that there was no Republican candidate on the ballot.
During the Democratic primary election to choose the candidate for Mayor only twenty-one percent of the Democratic voters turned out despite a field of three possible choices.
This was significantly lower than the forty-one percent that voted in the 1993 Democratic primary in which I was a candidate for Mayor.
I am proud to have been a candidate that achieved that turnout –even if I was disappointed at the result.
The 24,174 votes cast in this general election is far cry from the 97,000 votes cast in the mayoral race in 1949, the year I was born.
There are a multitude of reasons for this low turnout.
At the outset, it has to be noted that the population of Syracuse has shrunk.
In 1950, Syracuse ranked forty-seventh in size with a population of 220,583 people.
Today, it ranks one-hundred and eighty-third with a population of 143,378.
Some of this decline is attributable to the suburban sprawl that central New York experienced.
The manufacturing and industrial decline that hit the region as large employers closed and moved their operations to other parts of the country and overseas is another factor.
Another factor, although difficult to measure, is how city residents get their news.
In 1949 and earlier there were two newspapers and even more at the turn of that century.
These newspapers published several times per day and there was always fresh information in each succeeding edition.
The current newspaper, the Syracuse-Post Standard, is delivered to subscribers on only three days per week.
The Syracuse.com website is free but one can only speculate whether the poor and the elderly have computers and internet access.
One can also purchase a daily edition but the price is one dollar and twenty-five cents and the Sunday edition is three dollars.
It seems doubtful that people living in poverty or on fixed incomes will build that weekly expense into their budget.
That leaves a fully informed city electorate wanting.
There are, of course, other reasons that people don’t turn out to vote.
We just elected a President of the United States that spent over a year proclaiming that the system is “rigged.”
Although he hasn’t made that claim since he won, the message lives on.
The United States Supreme Court has turned the electoral process into a cesspool with its idiotic ruling that unlimited amounts of money can be spent because it amounts to “Free Speech.”
Add to that, the tax laws allow for the creation of entities that not only can spend unlimited amounts of money but can also shroud the donors in secrecy, and it’s not hard to see why voters are turned off and don’t trust the system.
We also don’t make it easy to vote.
Some states engage in outright voter suppression by limiting or eliminating early voting.
Others impose onerous identification requirements that hit the poor particularly hard.
Even our own state has fairly stringent residency requirements that must be met which discourage student voting and the transient population at the lower end of the economic ladder.
Contrast that with Oregon, which allows voting by mail and has a participation level in the eightieth percentile.
Finally, there are a significant number of people, especially here in New York, who believe it doesn’t make any difference who they vote for, that all politicians are corrupt and reform is impossible.
When one considers the number of public officials at the state and local level that are convicted of felonies related to their office, it’s hard to dispel the corruption notion.
The best evidence of the public’s cynicism was displayed in the election results this past week.
A proposition that would require public officials to forfeit their pensions if convicted of a felony related to their office was on the ballot.
Never mind the fact that it was a watered down version which contained plenty of exceptions and wiggle room that would allow these convicted felon to collect their pensions while in prison.
It passed overwhelmingly.
At the same time a measure that would have called for a constitutional convention, at which many reform measures could have been proposed, failed miserably.
The reason?
Voters believed that the delegates to the constitutional convention would be the same officials that are already in office.
Unless we find a way to address the issues that breed this public cynicism and despair, we can look forward to seeing an ever increasing shrinkage in voter turnout and participation.
That would be a shame because we are, after all, as Abraham Lincoln said in the dark days of the Civil War, “the last best hope on earth.”