Low election turnout means few decide for us all

It was a mixed day for democracy in the Mat-Su on Tuesday.

While there were a couple of encouraging signs from the local election — a 19-year-old assembly candidate showing youth apathy is a myth, cordial campaigns run by most candidates — there was again a woeful turnout at most precincts. One Wasilla polling station turned up fewer than 8 percent of registered voters.

Overall, the election turnout was around 13 percent, or about one in every eight registered voters. The highest local turnout was in Willow, where close to one in three registered voters showed up.

The fact that 30 percent turnout is something to applaud tells us all we need to know about the state of voter apathy in the Mat-Su.

While many people might have philosophical opposition to voting — not liking any of the candidates, for example, or conscientious objection to democracy on principle — we suspect most people failed to turn up at the polls because they simply don’t care about local politics.

But there’s a big problem with this attitude. The idea of democracy is that everyone should have a say in how the laws that govern our society are crafted. When a majority of citizens votes, it creates (in theory at least) a representative democracy that reflects the views of those in the community. When only a small percentage of people vote, that means small, motivated groups wield a disproportionate amount of power. That’s the opposite of what democracy is supposed to be.

Look at it this way: In the Palmer City Council election, the first-place finisher received more than 300 votes, while the next two candidates got 140 each. A single church congregation, for example, or any well-coordinated group of like-minded individuals could easily have swayed that election for whichever candidate they wanted in place. Heck, a big enough group of hunting buddies who decided to vote as a bloc would be a formidable force to be reckoned with.

When small groups of people make decisions for the rest of us, the process suffers immensely. Without input from everyone, we end up with a government elected by a frighteningly small minority of people.

This is not to say those elected are unworthy candidates, or that we have any quibbles with how the votes turned out. Whatever the turnout, the results must be respected. That’s how our system works.

But anyone who is unhappy about how the election broke should ask themselves if they did enough to ensure our system worked as well as it could have.

There’s an awful lot of voters out there who didn’t.