The OC Voice is a portion of the OC Report newsletter where local residents may have a platform to talk about local issues they care about. Michael Taffe is the assistant City & State editor.
When people think of their government, they think about deliberation in Congress or the latest national news coverage. But the vast majority of our interactions with government happen at the local level.
Traffic lights, speed limits, utilities, police, schools, affordable housing, taxes: these are all decided by our local government bodies.
And yet, despite being at the center of the issues that impact us daily, turnout in our local elections is consistently the lowest of any race.
Voter turnout in Orange County was 71 percent in 2016 during elections for president, U.S. Senate, U.S. House, N.C. General Assembly, mayor and local boards. In 2018, when the highest office on the ballot was U.S. House, turnout dropped to 59 percent. And last week, when the only offices on the ballot were local, turnout plummeted to 18 percent.
This is not a new phenomenon. Turnout was actually up slightly in Orange County from 2017 — the last local-only election year. And Orange County tends to do better than North Carolina as a whole, with higher voter turnout than the state in the last six elections.
But with the winners of the race for Chapel Hill Town Council currently being decided by just 24 votes, one has to wonder how the race would be different if voter turnout looked more like 2018 or 2016.
County boards of elections are required to do some advertising of elections, and many interest groups and individual candidates hold get-out-the-vote efforts. But local elections tend to get less attention than federal races.
Before Election Day, we conducted video interviews with all twenty candidates campaigning in Chapel Hill and Carrboro. This year, we launched The OC Report, a weekly newsletter with news about the greater Orange County community. And on election night, we deployed more than 20 reporters to talk to voters and candidates at polling sites across the area.
