Detroit voter turnout is a crisis. Officials need to fix it. | Opinion
By any measure, this is a civic crisis.
Just 18% of Detroit's registered voters cast ballots in Tuesday's general election. Incumbent Mayor Mike Duggan was widely expected to win, but six Detroit City Council seats were up for grabs. Voters were asked to weigh in on three ballot proposals, from a task force to explore reparations to the decriminalization of hallucinogenic plants. In other words, it was a fairly consequential election.
Yet turnout in Tuesday's election sank to a 12-year low; 93,692 of 502,067 registered voters cast ballots.
Big-city municipal election turnout is never particularly high, but Detroit's was particularly low: In Boston this week, 28.9% of voters cast ballots, and 24% in New York City; a record-setting 53% percent voted in Minneapolis.
If turnout here hovered around 30%, we could blame individual voters, calling this apathy, or complacency. We could repeat the old axiom that not voting is a tacit endorsement of the status quo.
But 18% seems symptomatic of a deeper problem: Disengagement, en masse, from a municipal government that too many voters see as unconnected to their lives, even those who vote in gubernatorial or presidential contests. An erosion of trust, hastened by that scandal and this investigation.
And I'm truly perplexed by the yawn of it all, the lip service I expect to hear from elected officials — some of whom will call Tuesday's results a mandate — on the importance of improving voter turnout, followed by a swift retreat to inaction.
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I want to be absolutely clear about this: Detroit voters aren't at fault here. Nor is it acceptable for any elected official to rest comfortably on a victory decided by less than a fifth of the voting population. Every elected official, from mayor to council to clerk, must prioritize understanding why turnout is low, and must work to fix it, even if they've benefitted from a curated electorate.
Because this is what worries me: How low can voter participation sink before the idea of representative government becomes a joke?
'Cynicism causes apathy'
Why am I writing about Detroit? Because I live here. Other places with low turnout — Flat Rock or Dearborn Heights or Westland — well, that's a civic crisis, too, and I encourage folks in those places to get to work.
In the last mayoral election, 22% of Detroit's registered voters cast ballots. In 2013, it was 25%. In 2009, a year with four municipal elections and lots of voter fatigue, it was 17%.
The national average for turnout in municipal elections is around 27%, said Esmat Ishag-Osman of the nonpartisan Citizens Research Council, who has studied voter behavior, but 35% to 60% should be achievable.
Low turnout has a lot of causes, Ishag-Osman explained.
"Detroit has a strong grassroots activism base, but there’s a lack of engagement in the voting system," he said.
Detroit's most dedicated voters, like voters everywhere else, tend to be older and more educated. They're more likely to be middle class, to live in the city's most intact neighborhoods.
And not coincidentally, they're easier to find, Ishag-Osman pointed out: It's easy for campaign workers to canvass in the city's densest neighborhoods.
But in this city, which has experienced massive population decline, systemic disinvestment, a foreclosure crisis, widespread blight and subsequent demolition, some neighborhoods aren't very dense. That means it's harder for door-knocking, the bread-and-butter of get-out-the-vote efforts, to reach likely voters. Voters in those neighborhoods, he said, are often apprehensive or uninterested, or so disconnected from voting that they need information beyond a pamphlet or pitch for a particular issue or candidate.
Sometimes, Ishag-Osman said, "It's even convincing them that voting would do anything for them in the first place. Cynicism causes apathy, which causes less interest and a lack of knowledge or interest in being politically engaged."
Off years don't help
That our municipal elections are held in off years doesn't help, said Sheila Cockrel, co-founder of the civic engagement nonprofit Citizen Detroit, and a former member of the Detroit City Council — nor has the national focus on presidential politics.
"People have been educated to believe that the only election that is important is the presidential election, and that sets the stage to discourage the idea that local elections are important," Cockrel said. "A huge civic education program needs to be undertaken by elected officials, nonprofits and civic organizations to re-learn how central it is that we have an engaged democracy for local, municipal and state elections."
Cockrel concurs that some prospective voters simply feel too far removed from the process to participate at all.
But there are voters who cast ballots in presidential or gubernatorial elections who may be more easily incentivized to turn out for local elections..
Let's vote in 2026
In the 2020 presidential election, 257,619 Detroiters voted. That's 51% of the city's registered voters. In 2018's gubernatorial election, it was 194,260, or 41%. Still low, but more than double the roughly 20% clocked in most municipal election years.
So here's my modest proposal: Let's move municipal elections to presidential years. Instead of fighting the notion that presidential politics are the most vitally important, let's and use it to boost municipal voter engagement. Even a gubernatorial year would be an improvement over what's happening now.
Critics of this prospect worry that municipal elections would get lost among busy gubernatorial or presidential campaigns, arguing that off-year elections allow for a more thoughtful exploration of municipal issues.
To that, I'd respond: 18% turnout.
The city's charter, which sets our election dates, can be amended; any, or all, of Detroit's elected officials could champion this cause — and they should.
I'm open to other ideas, here — anything that might get Detroit voter turnout above freezing.
That won't be enough. Elected officials must also work to understand why some registered voters who just don't vote, why so many Detroiters feel alienated from city government, and work to repair those relationships.
But I'm not terribly optimistic. Another municipal election with abysmally low voter turnout seems set to pass unremarked. We're like the proverbial frog in boiling water. The temperature has crept up so slowly, we barely notice what's happened: Democracy itself is slipping away.
Nancy Kaffer is a columnist and member of the Free Press editorial board. She has covered local, state and national politics for two decades. Contact: [email protected]. Become a subscriber at Freep.com.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Opinion: 1st job for Detroit elected officials: Fix low voter turnout