Voter fatigue blamed for election downtrend

A local political analyst suggested the public is not as involved in politics following the recent downtrend reported in voter turnout for the 2022 municipal election in Windsor.

“It indicates that people aren’t as engaged at the municipal level and, in part, it could be that,” said Dr. Lydia Miljan, a political analyst and political science professor at the University of Windsor.

Miljan made this statement after the City of Windsor reported 31.57 per cent or 50,078 individual voters participated in the recent municipal election out of 158,604 registered voters.

Meanwhile, there was a 35.21 per cent voter turnout in 2018 and 37.46 per cent in the 2014 municipal elections.

Miljan said there could be other factors why people did not participate in the recent election and one of them is “voter fatigue.”

“We’ve had three elections in two years,” she said. “We had a provincial election this spring and now a municipal election so there could be voter fatigue on top of just coming out of Covid.”

In addition to voter fatigue, people could be struggling to follow and know the politicians, she said.

“You’ve got multiple races going on,” the professor said. “You’ve got a race for mayor, different school board trustees, then there are individual ward races. Within that, there could be a lot of people that you have to do research on, so it’s a lot of work for the voter.”

She added the low voter turnout could mean the community is satisfied with the ruling of the past municipal councils.

“There’s nothing terribly wrong with the way that the city council has been run for the last four years,” the analyst said. “So, people were happy with the status quo and they didn’t have a high motivation to get out to vote.”

But Miljan said she gets frustrated when people choose not to vote after the historic battle of people to achieve the right to vote.

“People don’t care until something happens,” said Miljan. “When they can’t build their house, they can’t find a place to live, their taxes go up, or their basement floods, then they get interested in politics.”