LYNN — There’s a giant lawn sign in Berwick, Maine, that I pass on my way up north that says “If you can vote, but don’t vote, you don’t count, right?”
Based on yesterday’s results, lots of people don’t count.
In Lynn, a paltry 11.5 percent of the voters came out on a beautiful fall day for the preliminary election. That’s just 6,043 of the city’s registered 52,418 voters, the lowest turnout in the city since the 2011 primary.
If you dig a little deeper, more than 17,000 of Lynn’s citizens haven’t even bothered to register.
What’s going on?
In interviews with two dozen customers Wednesday, the day after the election, at Starbucks and Dunkin’ Donuts on the Lynnway, not one person had voted.
One 25-year-old man from Ward 2 said he knew there was an election, but didn’t know the council or mayoral candidates well enough to vote. A school bus driver said she didn’t have time, but hopes to vote in November. One man said “There was an election?” while another told me: “My vote doesn’t matter.”
It wasn’t much better in Peabody where one City Council seat was up for grabs. Of the 6,578 registered voters in Ward 6, only 760 or 11.6 percent showed up. And while there are 34,840 registered voters in the city, about 14,000 folks don’t care enough to register.
Medford wasn’t much different. Less than 10 percent of the 37,547 voters came out for the primary, and there are 14,000 residents who haven’t registered.
David Hopkins, an associate professor of political science at Boston College, said there are reasons why turnout is low and why many folks are absent from voting altogether.
“Primaries tend to have the lowest turnout, especially at the state and local level,” he said. “Those races don’t get much media attention compared to general elections. So, many voters either don’t know there’s a race, and don’t know the candidates or the issues.”
Another factor that contributes to low turnout, he said, is the Democrat and Republican parties remain neutral until the final. As a result, it’s up to the candidates to mobilize the voters on their own and they typically don’t have the capacity to do that, he said. In addition, Hopkins said voters don’t perceive much difference between candidates in the same party.
But what about people who fail to register?
“There’s a feeling among many people that their vote doesn’t matter,” Hopkins said. “And for the rest, politics is just not important to them and they are out of the loop.”
