(Illustration by iStock/filo)
After more than a year of all-absorbing politics, it feels like half of America is exhausted—and the other half exhilarated. Everyone, not to mention those who try to keep our politics both peaceful and well-run, like election administrators, deserves a break.
But just as the new year is beginning, so are more elections, in thousands of municipalities. Rarely does a week go by without an election someplace in the United States, with votes happening to choose mayors, school boards, city councilors, and many other officials, as well as to decide ballot questions and bond measures. These local elections matter. After all, local governments spend nearly $2 trillion per year, determining policy on issues from education to zoning to policing.
Most voters will sit them out. This is an off-the-radar problem that imposes surprising, jaw-dropping costs on Americans (more on that in a moment). But unlike many of the problems facing American politics, it’s one that social innovators can solve.
Big Parties, Few Guests
Unlike presidential elections, in off-cycle local elections, most people don’t get out and vote. In the past six presidential elections from 2000 to 2024, turnout was about 60 percent, meaning three out of five eligible Americans voted. In congressional midterm elections, closer to 50 percent of registered voters participate. Both of these numbers have been trending modestly up, hitting 52 percent in 2022 and 64 percent in 2024.
In every one of these elections in the past decade, nonprofits and philanthropies have spent millions to lift turnout, and particularly to reduce disparities in who votes. If turning out a large and representative set of Americans is the goal, much of these funds are arguably misspent: Voter turnout in local elections is much worse.
Despite great fluctuations in local election turnout, it is commonly less than 20 percent of eligible voters—less than half of midterm turnout, and a third or less of presidential turnout.
While off-year turnout is a very small fraction of presidential turnout, election administration costs are much closer to the same. While laws vary by state and region, in most ways, election administrators need to do the same things for off-cycle elections as they do in high-turnout ones, printing ballots, reserving polling locations, testing machines, recruiting and deploying poll workers, auditing and certifying results, etc. In the past few years, as polarization, threats, and misinformation have led to more pressure and more work than ever for election administrators, little attention has gone to the many tasks and requirements they need to face, even in a “normal” four-year cycle. Looking at off-year local elections from this perspective, they are like expensive parties that administrators need to throw, investing countless hours and millions of taxpayer dollars—but, unlike presidential and midterm elections, hardly anyone attends them. From a fiscal management point of view, it’s a travesty.
But that’s far from the worst of it.
Broken Signals
Take a look at Dallas, one of the nation’s biggest cities. Over the course of the last three citywide contests, turnout in Dallas has not topped 10 percent.
Then there’s New York City. In the nation’s largest city, only 21 percent of registered voters cast ballots when Eric Adams won the race for mayor. That was actually an improvement from 2013 when only 13 percent turned out.
Local voter turnout is not just low, it is badly skewed. In local elections, homeowners, wealthier people, and older people are far more likely to participate, and young people, parents, renters, low-income people, and Black and Latino people far less likely to participate.
The turnout disparities in elections like these are jaw-dropping, and far worse than disparities regularly decried in mid-term and presidential elections. Indeed, in big cities with lower turnout, residents 65 years and older are up to 56 times more likely to vote than residents 18-34 years old.
Here is where the costs might be estimated in the billions. Local elections impact decisions that touch every American. Representative turnout is essential, because these elections provide signals to elected officials about what matters to community members—and give those communities the opportunity to “throw the bums out” if they think their officials are doing a poor job or if they prefer someone else. Candidates often say they pay attention to everyone, but sharp political consultants focus their attention—and that of their clients—on those who tend to actually vote.
Wait, isn’t this just a theoretical problem? Unfortunately, no. Again and again, by comparing hundreds of jurisdictions, some with on-year, high participation elections, and some with off-year, low participation elections, scholars have shown that low, disproportionate turnout in local elections creates a broken incentive system for local governments, leading to local policies that fail to address the needs of Americans, less than optimal use of the hundreds of billions local governments spend each year and elected officials who don’t reflect their communities. Indeed, in low-turnout, off-year elections, organized special interests can dominate, potentially to the detriment of everyone else.
Across the nation, there are a large number of philanthropists and civil society organizations and associations who have worked to improve city government. These include the National League of Cities, the US Conference of Mayors, and the Bloomberg Center for Cities at Harvard University. Policy labs, urban mechanics offices, and research-practice partnerships connect universities to local government and otherwise aim to surge talent and resources into local governments to make them more effective. Yet, incentives matter. Too often, off-cycle, low-turnout elections mean that local officials are ultimately accountable only to a tiny, unrepresentative sliver of their communities, instead of the broad majority. In other words, these off-cycle elections impede efforts to improve government performance in a profound way—by reducing the incentives for mayors and other local elected leaders to want to improve performance in the first place. Is it any wonder that, in too many cities across the nation, leaders are often accused of doling out favors to friends and cronies, instead of serving the broad public?
Here, then, is a task worth doing. At a time when effective local decision-making is crucial to progress on issues Americans care deeply about, from housing to crime, fixing these incentives could be a way to break cities free of status quo gridlock and to encourage dynamic governance that delivers solutions that broad majorities want.
Moneyball
Can these incentives be fixed? And, if so, what would it cost? Well, of course, one method of fixing the problem would be to try to build a copy of America’s even-year voter turnout infrastructure for off-year elections. Unfortunately, doing so would require raising and spending hundreds of millions or a billion or two annually to pay for advertisements, social media campaigns, door-to-door canvassers, and the like. Such funds, as any city-level civic engagement advocate will tell you—are not forthcoming.
Even if they were, such efforts would probably not work. While, in theory, nonpartisan philanthropies might invest in off-year election turnout the way they do in on-years, the political parties would never do so, for obvious reasons—presidential, senatorial, and congressional candidates aren’t on the ballot. Looking across many nations, researchers find that places with many elections tend to have very low turnout, while those with fewer elections have higher turnout. In other words, you feel it, and comparative analysis confirms it: Voter fatigue is real.
Luckily, there is a much cheaper approach. If civil society cannot generate the conditions that are necessary for high turnout and relatively representative participation in off-year, local elections, there’s another option: Leaders can move the dates of local elections to even years, to the same election days and same ballots as state and federal contests, when those conditions are present.
Consider two examples from cities that have made the shift. In Baltimore—one of the first big US cities to move to November even-year elections—local election participation skyrocketed from a low of only 13 percent in the last odd-year election to 60 percent in the first on-cycle contest. In Los Angeles, participation soared from an average of only about a quarter million voters in the city’s off-cycle contests to just under one million voters in 2022 in the city’s first-ever November even-year mayoral contest. The result was a historic night in which the city elected its first female mayor (Karen Bass) and more women (six) than ever to the city council.
How can shifts in the dates of local elections change all this? First and foremost, moving to even-year November elections makes voting easier. When local elections are not held on the first Tuesday in November with national races, voters need to learn the date of their local election, find their local polling place, and often make a separate trip to the polls just to vote in local contests. When, however, local elections occur on the same day as presidential or midterm contests, citizens already planning to vote for higher-level offices need only check off a few more boxes further down the ballot.
Not surprisingly then, study after study has found that moving to November even-year elections doubles or even triples turnout.
The bottom line is that shifting election dates of city, county, and school district elections could increase local voter participation rates from a very low baseline (roughly 10 to 30 percent of eligible voters) to much higher levels (closer to 60 percent of eligible voters). The hard numbers are large: There are about 30 million voters who participate in presidential elections but not local ones, and whose votes could make a difference in cities nationwide.
Compared to other election changes aimed to boost participation in which civil society has invested significant resources, like early voting, online voter registration, automatic voter registration, we think the most important change we can undertake to increase turnout is to move local elections to November of even years.
Better Signals, Better Government, and More Reflective Representation
Shifting local elections to even-year, on-cycle dates does not only increase the number of voters, it also alters the makeup of the voting population, making it more similar to the overall population of the community. Take California: When municipal elections were off-cycle, roughly half of all local voters were over age 55, even though people over 55 make up only 18 percent of the state’s population. After the shift, the over-55 share of the vote fell to 28 percent. Even-year elections also made the vote more representative along racial and economic lines, increasing the Latino vote share by seven percentage points and reducing the share of wealthy voters (who are over-represented in odd-year elections) by two points.
All of this ultimately makes government officials more representative of the public and government policy more responsive to the median resident. Indeed, in California, the shift to even-year local elections appeared to induce more Latinos to run for and win office, ultimately eliminating Latino underrepresentation on city councils in the cities that shifted. Elsewhere, moving to even-year elections has reduced racial disparities in council representation and led to government policies that are more in line with the preferences of the median resident.
Popular and Possible
For these reasons, election timing changes have been moving forward in a growing set of cities and states. With almost no outside investment, small groups of citizens, elected officials, and coalitions of community organizations and government accountability groups have won statewide victories to change local elections to even-year November dates in Arizona, California, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, and Virginia. Over 120 cities across the nation have changed their own election dates.
What has enabled this progress so far, and what might help to facilitate more progress in the future? Consider that many other ideas for improving democracy, like reforming the filibuster in the Senate or passing a constitutional amendment to defend the right to vote, get a lot of discussion and energy from time to time, but rarely seem to go anywhere.
Moving local elections to even years is different from those reforms for two reasons.
First, election consolidation is easy to understand—and popular. Gerrymandering reform, open primaries, and campaign finance reform proposals often require expensive public education efforts, messaging proposals, consultants, and more to help advocates communicate their aims in compelling and easy-to-understand ways. When voters and policy makers are asked to consider changes that at first seem complex or confusing, reformers have to get over the hurdle of skepticism that people instinctively deploy when confronted with complex propositions. But asking voters whether they would like to have fewer different election dates and vote on more contests in even-year Novembers is exactly what it sounds like—and intuitively popular.
The polls tell the story. When asked, some two-thirds of Americans favor moving local elections to even-year Novembers, including majorities of Democrats, Republicans, and independents alike.
Secondly, at a time when national politics is incredibly contested, moving local elections to even years has another virtue—it does not require an act of Congress. In fact, in 19 states, cities and towns have full local control of their election dates. Hundreds of cities like these can consolidate local elections to even years by passing a municipal ordinance, passing a city ballot initiative, or amending their city charter. In another 24 states, state-level legislation (or, in some cases, ballot initiatives) could change timing statewide, or give cities local control and incentives to make their consolidation decisions. So, instead of one venue where the reform can move (like Congress), or 50 (as in state laws), going local offers hundreds of opportunities.
The popularity of even-year local elections is most apparent where the rubber meets the road: in actual policy debates. Organized opposition is rare. Nationally, no major organizations have emerged to oppose on-cycle elections and little to no money has been spent to campaign against shifts in timing. Local ballot initiatives to move to November even-year contests almost always succeed. In almost 50 cities where residents have been asked to vote on whether or not to move to even-year elections, they have said yes 97 percent of the time, often by overwhelming margins. St. Paul, Minnesota, was the latest to do so, with over 60 percent of voters casting ballots for consolidated elections. That’s landslide territory.
Tried and True … and Cheap
Moving election timing to even years is different from major new federal reforms in another way: November even-year local elections have a long track record in the United States. In places where mayors, city council members, and school board officials are elected on the first November of even years, the evidence shows that elections run smoothly—as well, or better than in places with odd-year elections. For election officials, fewer election dates can mean more time to focus on running a small number of large elections well. In states like California and Arizona where most of the big cities have recently shifted to consolidated elections, city clerks and other election administrators report no major problems with the transition and a happier, more involved electorate.
Finally, there are the cost benefits of election timing reform. Holding fewer elections is cheaper than holding more elections. Counting votes all at once is cheaper than counting different contests on different dates. For example, a recent report indicated that moving to even-year elections would save Idaho, Montana, and Washington $30 million dollars every two years.
Equally important as what happens when elections are consolidated—much higher and more representative participation, and more responsive local government—is what does not happen. Moving local election days to even years hasn’t led to systematic shifts in partisan victories. Moving local elections to even years hasn’t given Democrats or Republicans noticeable new advantages or disadvantages in their battles against each other. Instead, moving local elections on-cycle has just meant that candidates from both parties (as well as independent and third-party candidates) need to find ways to appeal to a broader, more representative electorate.
What Comes Next?
It is too late to change the dates for the upcoming local elections this year. Elections will happen—and bet on it, turnout will be low—in New York and Albuquerque and Atlanta and Seattle, among hundreds of other municipalities. For those elections, the best civil society can do is muddle through.
But progress can be made in many places if civil society engages. Several states are already actively considering new legislation to move to even-year elections (New York, Montana, Idaho, Tennessee, Oklahoma). In the 19 states where cities can move their own dates, debate is underway in cities like Tampa Bay and Houston. What happens next is wide open. For most people concerned about democracy and governance, struggles over federal power and policy will take most—or even all—of their time, focus, and resources. The question is how many of us will invest some of our energy at the local level.
Read more stories by Avi Green & Zoltan Hajnal.