Sunday, November 07, 1999
Turnout of voters baffling
Participation in city, county takes nose dive
BY HOWARD WILKINSON
The Cincinnati Enquirer
If voter turnout in Cincinnati City Council elections continues at the pace set in the 1990s, Cincinnati will hold a council election in 2015 and no one will show up.
The number of Cincinnatians who showed up Tuesday to elect a City Council was fully one-third less the number who voted in the first council election of the decade, in 1991, continuing a downward spiral of voter participation that has left political party leaders and candidates scratching their heads.
Tuesday, only 66,901 — or 32 percent — of the city's 207,624 registered voters showed up to vote in an election that was not without significant races and issues to decide.
A new mayor was chosen; nine City Council members were elected; three of seven seats on the Cincinnati school board were at stake; and a school levy that school administrators said was critical to the Cincinnati Public Schools was defeated.
And, for that, 32,147 fewer voters showed up at the polls in Cincinnati than did in 1991.
It was part of a decline in voter participation in Cincinnati that began early in the decade and started to nose-dive two years ago.
Tuesday, elections officials were at a loss to explain it.
“It can't all be explained by the weather,” said Tim Burke, chairman of the Hamilton County Board of Elections. “There's something deeper at work here.”
Whatever it is, it is not a phenomenon unique to Cincinnati City Council elections — the county-wide turnout in Hamilton County was only 32 percent Tuesday; election offi-
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