Why so many elections when one would do?

Now that we’ve had time to dust off after the latest round of voting, a question has to be asked: Why do we have so many elections?

We go to the polls at least once a year here and every other year, twice. That’s if there are no special elections.

The first thing that comes to mind is the money.

It has to be expensive to hold elections. There’s the physical part of just printing the ballots, publishing public notices, paying people to set up and take down the booths, and printing and mailing sample ballots.

Then there’s the hiring of people to run the precinct voting, the pay to borough and city staff to count ballots into the night along with other personnel needs.

That’s the measurable toll these elections exact on the taxpayers.

The other toll is the lack of voter participation.

When a boroughwide sales tax can only draw 21 percent of registered voters, what’s it going to take to get that number higher? An initiative for the Mat-Su Borough to secede from the state?

It’s common knowledge that there are some people who just don’t vote. They don’t care. They’re happy in their cocoon. Those people exist all over the nation, not just in Alaska.

There may be another force at work in the Valley, though. With such a large migration here from other places, particularly Anchorage, it wouldn’t be a stretch to believe that those people, who probably still work in Anchorage, still have their hearts and minds there.

They pretty much sleep here and spend weekends here, so they aren’t that connected to local politics. They probably learned in Anchorage that getting heard among the roaring crowd isn’t that easy. Whereas here, if you have a complaint, three minutes await you at any city council or assembly meeting you want to attend.

The only solid answer for getting more people to vote in local elections is to combine them with the national elections that take place every other year. If there’s a president on the line, or a tight congressional race, people will come out. That’s the best outcome.

There would have to be some adjustments made where local three-year terms are code, but those are easy fixes.

In addition to more people voting, we could save a lot of money by having one election every two years instead of four — or more — every four years.

That’s a win-win.