Why Is Voting Important in Local Elections?

Why Is Voting Important in Local Elections? The Race Nobody Watches (But Everyone Feels)

I want to start with a confession. I used to be the person who voted religiously every four years and skipped everything else. I thought I was a good citizen. I wasn’t. I was showing up for the Super Bowl of elections and missing every regular-season game — the games that actually decided whether my street got repaved, whether my kid’s school got new textbooks, and whether the police department in my town used body cameras. That’s the trap. And I think most of us are standing in it right now, checking our phones, wondering why nothing in our neighborhood ever seems to change.

The Problem: We Treat Local Elections Like an Afterthought

Here’s the uncomfortable truth. Presidential elections get the ads, the debates, the late-night jokes, and the office pool. Local elections get a flyer stuck in your storm door and a ballot you fill out half-asleep, if you fill it out at all.

The numbers back this up, and they’re not flattering. A widely cited Portland State University study — part of the university’s “Who Votes for Mayor?” project — looked at America’s 30 largest cities and found that in 10 of them, voter turnout for mayoral races was under 15 percent of eligible citizens. In Dallas, Fort Worth, and Las Vegas, turnout dropped into the single digits. Single digits, for the person who controls your city’s budget, police department, and zoning board.

Compare that to the 2024 presidential race, where the Census Bureau reported that 65.3 percent of U.S. citizens cast a ballot. That’s a staggering gap between how many of us weigh in on the presidency and how many of us weigh in on the person who decides whether there’s a stop sign at the end of your block.

Why Are Local Elections More Important Than Federal Elections?

I’ll take a stand here, because I think the “balanced” answer undersells it: for your day-to-day life, local elections matter more than federal ones. Not instead of federal elections. More, in the sense of frequency and reach into your actual routine.

Think about your last twenty-four hours. Did you drive on a road? Drink tap water? Send a kid to school? Call the police, or hope you’d never need to? Every one of those touchpoints was shaped by a decision made in a city council chamber, a school board meeting, or a county commissioner’s office — not by Congress. As the National Civic League has documented, local elections are historically both low-turnout and less representative of a community’s actual demographics, which means the people who do show up end up making decisions for everyone, including the people who stayed home.

Local government also moves fast, for better or worse. A city council can pass a new zoning ordinance in a matter of weeks. A federal law can take years, if it happens at all. That speed cuts both ways — it’s exactly why your vote in these races has an outsized, almost immediate effect on the place you live.

How Local Elections Affect Our Daily Lives

Let me get specific, because “local government matters” is the kind of sentence that sounds true and says nothing. Here’s what’s actually on the ballot when you vote locally, according to the National League of Cities and the National Civic League:

• Public safety. Police funding, staffing levels, and oversight policies are set locally, often by an elected council working with a chief who answers to that council.
• School boards — one of the largest groups of elected officials in the entire country — set curriculum priorities, approve budgets, and hire superintendents.
• Potholes, sidewalks, snow removal, and public transit routes are municipal decisions, funded by municipal budgets that local officials approve.
• Housing and zoning. Whether a new apartment building, a corner store, or a warehouse gets approved next to your house is almost always a local planning and zoning call.
• Water and utilities. Your water bill, water quality testing, and utility rate increases typically trace back to a local commission or council vote.
• Parks, libraries, and public health. Funding levels for the library that just cut its Saturday hours, or the health department that ran your last vaccine clinic, were set locally.

None of this is abstract. It’s the texture of an ordinary week. And here’s the wildcard most people never think about: your local ballot might also include judges, coroners, and even soil and water conservation district seats — races so far down the ballot that most voters skip them entirely, even though a coroner’s office directly affects how your community investigates unexplained deaths. Skipping those isn’t neutral. It’s handing the decision to whoever else showed up.

What Is a Municipal Election, Exactly?

A municipal election is any election held by a city, town, or village government to fill local offices — mayor, city council, school board, and sometimes municipal judges or clerks — or to decide local ballot measures like bond issues and tax levies. Municipal elections are distinct from state and federal elections in three ways I think matter enormously:

1. Most municipalities hold elections in odd-numbered years, deliberately separated from the presidential and midterm calendar. The idea, dating back over a century, was to let voters focus on local issues without national noise. In practice, it mostly just means fewer people show up.
2. A city council race might be decided by a few hundred votes. I’ve seen local races in small towns decided by a literal coin flip after a tie.
3. Cities run under different charters — mayor-council, council-manager, or commission forms of government — which changes who actually holds the power you’re voting for. The National League of Cities notes that in roughly 76 percent of U.S. cities, voters elect the mayor or council president directly, though the mayor’s actual authority varies widely by charter.

That third point trips people up constantly. In a “strong mayor” city, your mayoral vote elects someone with real executive authority over the budget and city staff. In a “council-manager” city, the mayor might be largely ceremonial, and the real day-to-day power sits with an appointed city manager the council hires and can fire. Knowing which kind of city you live in changes how much weight your vote for mayor actually carries versus your vote for council.

Why Is It Important to Vote in State and Local Elections?

State and local elections share a quieter cousin problem: they’re both overshadowed by the presidential race, and both quietly run the machinery that federal government doesn’t touch. State legislatures draw congressional maps, set education funding formulas, and regulate everything from insurance to occupational licensing. Local governments handle the rest — the services you touch with your hands.

I’d also point out something the States United Democracy Center found in its analysis of the 2024 election: down-ballot voting has actually been improving. “Roll-off” — the phenomenon where voters mark the top of the ballot and quit — dropped from around 4 percent in the early 2000s to less than 1 percent in 2024. People are getting better at finishing their ballots. That’s a genuinely hopeful data point, and it suggests that once voters understand what’s at stake down-ballot, they follow through.

3 Reasons Why It Is Important to Vote (Beyond the Obvious)

Everyone’s heard “your vote is your voice.” Fine. Here are three reasons that go a little deeper, and one of them is the reason I actually care about this topic.

4. Small electorates mean individual votes carry real mathematical weight. In a presidential election with over 150 million ballots cast, your individual vote is a rounding error, statistically speaking, even though I still think you should cast it. In a city council primary with 800 voters, your vote is worth roughly 190,000 times more in relative terms. That’s not a rhetorical flourish. That’s arithmetic.
5. Non-voters get governed by voters’ priorities. The National Civic League has found that affluent voters turn out at rates 30 to 50 percent higher than lower-income voters in local races, and that residents over 65 are far more likely to vote locally than residents under 35. When one group votes and another doesn’t, policies tend to reflect the group that showed up — not the whole community.
6. Local office is the farm system for every higher office. Look at nearly any governor, senator, or president, and you’ll usually find a school board seat, a city council term, or a county commission role somewhere back in their record. Skipping local elections doesn’t just affect this year’s potholes. It shapes who’s even in the pipeline for the offices you do pay attention to.

Why Do Local Elections Have Such Low Voter Turnout?

I think there are three honest answers, and I’d rather give you honest ones than tidy ones.

First, timing. Off-cycle, odd-year elections were designed partly to insulate local races from national political noise, and they’ve succeeded — just not in the way anyone intended. Election timing is, according to the National Civic League, the single strongest predictor of turnout. Move a local race onto the same ballot as a presidential or midterm election, and turnout climbs. Isolate it in an off-year, and it craters.

Second, information cost. It takes real effort to learn who’s running for county commissioner or water district trustee. There’s no primetime debate. No viral clip. Research summarized by public affairs journalists points to a lack of awareness about candidates, and a lack of understanding of what local officials actually do, as leading drivers of low turnout.

Third, and this one is uncomfortable: apathy compounds. When people believe their vote doesn’t matter locally, they skip it, which shrinks the electorate further, which makes each remaining vote matter more — a fact that, ironically, should motivate the very people tempted to stay home.

What Is the Actual Job of Local Government Officials?

This is worth spelling out because I’ve found most people genuinely don’t know, and it’s not their fault — civics classes spend a semester on the three branches of federal government and about ten minutes on the county clerk.

• Mayors, depending on the city’s charter, prepare and administer the municipal budget, appoint department heads or work alongside a city manager who does, represent the city to state and federal government, and often chair the city council.
• City council members (sometimes called aldermen, selectmen, or commissioners depending on the region) are the local legislature. They pass ordinances, approve budgets, set tax rates within state limits, and oversee zoning and land use decisions.
• School board members hire and evaluate the superintendent, approve curriculum and budgets, and set policy on everything from school safety to how reading is taught — a scope the Carnegie Corporation has noted became especially visible during recent fights over book access and pandemic recovery funding.
• County commissioners, sheriffs, clerks, and judges run elections, courts, jails, property records, and public health departments in many states — offices most voters have never researched before walking into the booth.

Every one of these roles is filled, or left to a tiny sliver of the electorate to fill, on election night.

Do Local Elections Impact National Politics?

Yes, more than most people assume, and in two distinct ways. First, there’s the pipeline effect I mentioned — today’s city council member is tomorrow’s state legislator, and a fair number of members of Congress cut their teeth in local office. Second, and more structurally, local election administrators — the county clerks and election boards elected or appointed through local politics — run the actual machinery of federal elections. The people who set up polling places, count ballots, and certify results for president and Congress are, in most of the country, local officials. Local elections decide who’s trusted with that machinery.

How Do Local Election Results Affect My Daily Life?

If you want the blunt version: the person you elect to your school board decides whether your child’s school gets new HVAC systems or crumbling ones. The people on your city council decide whether the intersection you drive through every morning gets a traffic light or another accident report. Your county commissioners decide whether the public health clinic near you stays open five days a week or drops to three.

I’ve talked to residents in mid-sized towns who could tell you nothing about their city council but everything about a pothole that’s been there for two years. That pothole isn’t a mystery. It’s a budget line item that a handful of voters decided, or failed to decide, in an election most of the town skipped.

The Solution: Why Is Voting Important in Local Elections, and What Do I Actually Do About It?

I’m not going to tell you to “get involved” and leave it there — that’s the empty advice that got us into this mess. Here’s what genuinely moves the needle, based on research from the National Civic League and States United Democracy Center, plus what I’ve watched work in practice.

• Know your calendar. Local races often happen in odd years, in the spring, or attached to primaries you’d otherwise ignore. Mark them the way you’d mark a birthday.
• Check your registration before, not on, election day. Confirming your voter registration card status early avoids the scramble that keeps otherwise willing voters home.
• Vote early when you can. Communities that build early-voting habits carry them down the ballot — worth knowing before Vote Early Day 2026 rolls around.
• Read one local voter guide, not ten national op-eds. Most counties and civic organizations publish nonpartisan candidate guides. One read-through beats an hour of cable news.
• Bring a friend, literally. Turnout research consistently shows social nudges — a text, a ride, a reminder from someone you trust — move more people than any ad campaign. This is where youth engagement strategy work has shown real promise, since younger voters respond disproportionately to peer outreach rather than institutional messaging.
• The wildcard option: adopt one down-ballot race as “yours” every cycle — school board, water district, whatever’s on your ballot that nobody else is talking about — and become the person in your friend group who actually knows something about it. It sounds small. It’s how informed communities get built, one obsessive amateur at a time.

I’ll be honest about why I care about this particular corner of civic life. I didn’t grow up thinking about local government at all. It took watching a city council meeting decide, in about eleven minutes, to defund a program that mattered to my neighborhood, with maybe thirty residents in the room, for me to understand how thin the margin of attention really is. Thirty people. Eleven minutes. That’s not democracy failing. That’s democracy doing exactly what it’s built to do when only a few people bother to steer it.

For more on why this particular race deserves your attention, the nonpartisan breakdown at Why Is Voting Important in Local Elections is worth a read alongside the civic engagement coverage over at Culture Mosaic.

Sources

• Portland State University, “Who Votes for Mayor?” — municipal turnout data across America’s 30 largest cities
• National Civic League, “Increasing Voter Turnout in Local Elections”
• S. Census Bureau, “2024 Presidential Election Voting and Registration Tables,” April 30, 2025
• National League of Cities, “Cities 101 — Council Powers” and “Cities 101 — Mayoral Powers”
• States United Democracy Center, “Voter Turnout in American Elections Since 2000”
• Carnegie Corporation of New York, “Visualizing Voter Turnout in Local and School Board Elections”
• National School Boards Association, turnout estimates for school board elections

About the Author: Marcus J. Holloway, PhD, covers civic engagement and American local governance for Culture Mosaic, focusing on how everyday residents can build influence in the institutions closest to home.