jackiedoherty.org

It’s supposed to rain tomorrow, which doesn’t bode well for voter turnout, although  the weather was perfectly fine two years ago and the turnout remained stagnant at around 25%.  Thinking about voter turnout and why people vote or don’t vote compelled me to look at the data for the last few local elections compared to that of 2004. As you can see below, in the last two local elections (2003 and 2005), voter turnout has remained at around 26% in Lowell, with only about 12,000 of the registered voters in the city bothering to vote. While the number of registered voters has increased since 1999 and 2001, the percentage who vote has actually gone down, who knows why? The really interesting contrast is between the local elections and the presidential election of 2004.  Imagine if 30,000 people turned out to vote tomorrow! 

         Turnout        Registered       %

1999   14300        44431             32

2001    14708       45381             32

2003    12222       47048             26

2004     29148      48405             60

2005     12653      47484             27

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 6th, 2007 at 12:09 am and is filed under Campaign, Local Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.