Submitted by Illinoisnoki1 on Wed, 03/23/2011 - 12:02

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By Bill Bianchi, PDA-Chicago

On the surface at least it looks as Rahm Emanuel has received a mandate from the people of Chicago. 

He garnered an impressive 55% of the vote in a 6 candidate field, receiving substantial support from African American voters. He even did well among Latino voters despite two viable Hispanic candidates, Gery Chico and Miguel Del Valle. Meanwhile the anti—machine or perhaps anti-corporate progressive candidate (Del Valle) received a bit less than 10%. While we may be unhappy with those results, it seems that the people of Chicago have spoken and that's that.

But a closer look at the results of the recent municipal elections shows a much different story, one of voter disengagement and deep questions about what passes for democracy in our city.

To uncover this story let’s look closely at what did and did not happen during the municipal elections.

First, compare the actual vote with what could have been:

 While Rahm was the clear choice of those who did vote, he was elected by less than 16% of the city’s voting age population. That’s about one out of six. Certainly that’s a lot better than any of the others got, but hardly a mandate.

And it begs the question, why don’t more of Chicago’s citizens vote? Nearly three quarters of the city’s voting age population, almost 1.5 million people, sat on the sidelines. What’s with them? Wouldn’t it be great if some of our big media polled the non-voters and asked them, “What’s up? That was your chance to select the guy, and you sat home”?

Of course the first barrier to voting is the business of registration. Here’s the story on registration and non-registration.

Out of Chicago’s 2.1 million voting age population, 68% or 1.4 million were registered. That means 667,931 voting age Chicagoans are not registered, more people are unregistered than actually voted!

Now there are all kinds of reasons for not registering, such as, “I’m not a citizen.”--that group could number in the hundreds of thousands. Another big group of unregistered might include ex-cons whose sense of civic engagement is, well, a tad weak. They may think, wrongly, that they can’t register, or they may be so angry and alienated they just won’t.

Beyond the non-citizens and the ex-cons, I’m guessing there exists tens of thousands whose lives are so stressed they simply don’t have time to register. And of course there are the uncounted thousands who simply don’t give a flying f***.   Nevertheless, in successful democracies, the leaders work continually to get everyone engaged in the electoral process, something that Chicago’s leaders don’t and perhaps won’t do.

Now let’s look at how the registered voters performed.

**Compare to 82% of eligible (registered?) voters who voted in the 1983 Harold Washington campaign. Source: Mike Miner, "The Most Influential ARticle...Published, Chicago Reader, 3/31/11

According to the Chicago Board of Elections, 58% of the city’s registered voters did not vote. Think about it. In what may have been the most important municipal election in 40 years, a big majority of registered voters, 811,299, didn’t participate.

So while Rahm took 55% of the vote, his total equals just 23.2% of the city’s registered voters. All other candidates combined received a mere 18.8% of the registered vote.

So what’s up with the 800,000+ registered non-voters? Are they bad people? Probably not. In fact we don’t really know who they are and why they choose not to vote.  But here are some plausible answers:

1. People liked Rahm and thought he was sure to win, so no need
    for them to vote.
2. People didn’t like Rahm and thought he was sure to win, so they
   stayed home out of disgust.
3. After 40+ years of Daley rule, people have gotten out of the habit
   of voting for mayor or perhaps no longer understand the concept
   of the people actually selecting their mayor.
4. Chicagoans like many Americans, don’t see any need to vote
     because:

• They think the system is corrupt, serves only the rich, so why bother voting?
• We live in a managed democracy; the powers that be are always in control, so the individual elections don’t really matter.

5. Chicago’s municipal leaders don’t want a big turnout because that
   might upset their apple carts. So they arrange elections in ways
   that discourage turnout.  Some easy ways to discourage turnout
   include:
   1) holding the election on an off year—instead of on the year of
       presidential elections when turnout is highest;
    2) holding the election in the dead of winter when cold weather
        and darkness depress turnout.
    3) holding elections on a work day instead of a weekend or
        making election day a holiday, as it is in many other democratic
        countries.

What it all adds up to is that Chicago’s democratic process is failing. The majority don’t participate even for open seat elections, and that trend is likely to grow.

To combat this trend we need to make some obvious technical changes to the current process, such as: make registration automatic, hold elections in warm weather and make election day a holiday. Why shouldn’t our election day be as important as Casimir Pulaski Day?

We should also learn more about the registered non-voters.  Are they, as a group, similar or different from those who do vote--in terms of social-economic class, location, income, home ownership, ethnicity, etc? If they had voted, would the outcome have been different?

More important, however, we need to revive (or build) the people’s interest in participating in a democratic political processes. To do that, we should recognize that those processes include more than elections. They include things like participatory government, local school and park councils, community organizations, cooperative enterprises, volunteer and advisory groups, and even democracy in the workplace.  Any of those might be more important to people than elections.

The job for Chicago progressives is to help create or restore a political culture that makes democratic political process part of our daily life. If we did that, then you can be sure, people would participate in elections.