Chicago voters are turning out. With the Feb. 28 municipal elections just days away, that’s a bright oasis in these democracy-challenged times.
In this year’s elections for Chicago’s top city and aldermanic offices, the early vote — mail-in and in-person — is surpassing previous elections.
Champions of mail-in and early in-person voting have long argued electoral reforms would encourage more participation in the democratic process. They are correct.
Through Thursday, Chicago voters had cast more than 85,800 ballots, the city Board of Election Commissioners reported. In the 2019 municipal election, voters delivered a little more than 26,000 ballots around the same point in time, and some 27,600 had voted by this time in 2015.
“With this turnout so far, if it keeps up, we’re looking that we might get into the 40%,” Max Bever, spokesperson for the Chicago elections board, told WLS-Ch. 7 last week. “We might get that 2011 42% turnout or even higher.”
In-person voting is now available downtown and at locations in all 50 wards. If you don’t trust the U.S. mail, a reasonable view, you can drop off your vote-by-mail ballot at any site.
The early turnout has been fueled by mail-in ballots. Voters requested 203,842 mail-in ballots; 57,523 had been returned by Thursday, according to the elections board.
Chicagoans are voting in person at higher rates as well, with more than 28,000 Chicagoans voting at polling places as of Thursday, compared with 18,789 in the same period in the 2019 municipal election and 22,305 in 2015. The penchant for early voting has been spurred by the upheaval of the COVID-19 pandemic.
I went to the early voting Loop Super Site, at 191 N. Clark St., a couple of weeks ago. I was in and out in less than 10 minutes.
This good news is bucking what we saw during November’s midterm elections, when only 46% of registered voters turned out in Chicago — the lowest for a midterm election in the past 80 years, according to an analysis by WBEZ-FM 91.5.
I’m not chilling the Champagne just yet. While many are voting earlier, it’s unclear whether the heightened interest will continue through Election Day.
It has never been easier to vote, yet many of us still don’t bother. With early voting, you can’t blame an Election Day snowstorm. There are fewer scheduling conflicts since many of us are working at home. We can’t plead ignorance, given the deluge of social media, TV ads, mailers and other incessant reminders that, yes, there is an election.
In the Feb. 28 election, the fate of City Hall’s fifth floor is just one reason voters should care. There are open and highly contested aldermanic races across the city. Many of those contests, including the mayoral race, will go to an April 4 runoff.
Yet only a portion of those who are eligible to vote do so. There are currently 1.58 million registered voters in Chicago. Not even half of those will vote. And hundreds of thousands more eligible voters are not registered. Alas, we are a lifetime away from the 1983 historic race that led to the election of Harold Washington, Chicago’s first Black mayor.
In the Feb. 22, 1983, Democratic primary, 1.2 million Chicagoans — 77.5% of the city’s registered voters — went to the polls, according to an analysis by professor Paul M. Green, then director of the Institute for Public Policy at Governors State University. Washington won in the “frenzied” three-way fight, Green noted, but faced a stiff challenge from the Republican nominee, former state Rep. Bernard Epton, in the general election.
On April 12, a remarkable 82% of registered voters went to the polls. Washington defeated Epton with 51.7% of the vote, propelled by the massive turnout of Black voters. Those were the good old days. It was an “old-fashioned street fight that passed itself off as a mayoral election,” Green wrote at the time.
In the 1990s, the Democratic Party powers shifted from party primaries to a nonpartisan system. Some experts say that has contributed to diminishing voter interest in Chicago, an overwhelmingly Democratic city.
A new, nonpartisan poll sponsored by Northwestern University and a coalition of Black and Latino nonprofit organizations pegged the 2023 mayoral campaign as a tight, four-way race among incumbent Lori Lightfoot, former Chicago Public Schools CEO Paul Vallas, U.S. Rep. Jesus “Chuy” Garcia and businessman Willie Wilson.
Yet, more than 20% of voters said they remained undecided. The poll, conducted Feb. 5 to 10 by Northwestern’s Center for the Study of Diversity and Democracy, carries a margin of error of plus or minus 3.9%.
In the nine-way mayoral race, voters may be having a hard time separating the wheat from the chaff. Many may just sit it out.
When asked whether they were “certain” they would vote Feb. 28, “Latino voters show the lowest rates of being 100% certain to vote at 69%, followed by 78% of Black voters and 83% of white voters,” the Northwestern poll found.
When you don’t choose, we lose.
