A reality based independent journal of observation & analysis, serving the Flathead Valley & Montana since 2006. © James Conner.
Whitefish conducted its 3 November 2015 municipal election via mail ballot. Forty-six percent of the ballots were returned. For the rest of the Flathead, basically for Columbia Falls and Kalispell, only 14 percent of the registered voters cast ballots. Here’s the turnout summary:
For a breakdown, you can download my spreadsheet based on the county election department's official returns. The numbers are the same, but the Excel file is easier to work with than the county's space delimited file that's kind of a blast from the mainframe past.
Whitefish benefited not just from the alleged convenience of a mail ballot (mail ballots do increase turnout in oddly scheduled elections), but from a contested and spirited election, and from a vibrant culture of civic responsibility that considers voting a proud duty of citizenship.
I do not recommend that Kalispell and Columbia Falls use mail ballots. Instead, I recommend that the legislature schedule municipal (and school) elections for the general election ballot in even-numbered years. And for bonding and levy elections, for the general election ballot only in Presidential years, when turnout is the highest.
Writing at fivethirtyeight.com on 3 November 2015, assistant professor of political science at Yale Eitian Hersch makes a disturbing case that strong Democratic constituencies — teachers unions and municipal employees unions, respectively — favor low turnout elections because they believe their members turn out in high numbers while the philistines in general population do not:
Political scientist Sarah Anzia, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, gives a compelling explanation in an outstanding book published last year. The first point that Anzia makes is that the off-cycle election calendar is not a response to voter preferences; voters do not like taking multiple trips to the voting booth. Anzia asked a nationally representative sample of Americans if they prefer elections held at different times for different offices “because it allows voters to focus on a shorter list of candidates and issues during each election” or all at the same time “because combining the elections boosts voter turnout for local elections.” Voters of all political stripes prefer consolidated elections, and by wide margins. But that’s especially true for people who identify as Democrats, who prefer consolidated elections 73 percent to 27 percent.
Consolidation is popular, and during the decade-long period between 2001 and 2011 that Anzia studied, state legislatures across the country considered over 200 bills aimed at consolidating elections. About half, 102 bills, were focused specifically on moving school board election dates so that they would coincide with other elections. Only 25 became law.
The consolidation bills, which were generally sponsored by Republicans, typically failed because of Democratic opposition, according to Anzia. By her account, Democrats opposed the bills at the urging of Democratic-aligned interest groups, namely teachers unions and municipal employee organizations.
Montana’s voter registration list records whether a voter cast a ballot, so it would be possible to match those data against other databases to determine whether municipal employees dominated the voting in Kalispell and Columbia Falls, and whether they had a disproportionate influence in Whitefish. A good project for a graduate student in political science.