Voter Malaise Leads Colonial Heights

While the rest of the state and country was deeply engaged in election battles, the City of Colonial Heights had no such problems. There were no challengers for any seats in either the City Council or the School Board races.

That I suppose explains the lack of local signage. But it calls into question just how much the public is concerned about what happens in the city.

Is it really just candidate malaise, or is it just a major indifference among the voters? If we take a closer look at the election results, we can see that Mayor C. Scott Davis garnered the most votes, with 3,287 in the City Council race. On the other hand, both John E. Piotrowski and John T. Wood earned 400 fewer votes. What should we read into the fact that at least 400 people opted to vote for only one candidate?

Even if you remove the nearly 200 write-ins, you still have 200 people who opted not to exercise their extra voting privileges. In truth, the lack of a vote for the others improves the chances of the person you do vote for. In other words, a null vote to the other candidates carries as much weight as yes vote for the candidate of your choice. In effect, you get to vote twice, or thrice, for your candidate.

Even the School Board election had its share of abstainers. Mike Yates pulled in a massive 3524 votes, which was 200 more than Davis pulled in for City Council. In an uncontested race, Krishan Agrawal netted 2740 votes and secured the vacant seat. There were 93 write-in votes for School board.

I wonder where those other voters went?

It would seem to me, given that difference in voter counts, that somewhere in Colonial Heights there are a bunch of people who did not care to vote for some of the candidates in these races. Perhaps that means there is room for a new candidate, someone who has new ideas to try to move the city forward?

On the other hand, perhaps it means that the voters in Colonial Heights are happy with their representatives. I know I cast my votes, and somewhere in the mix all of my permitted votes were registered. After all, one can’t complain if one doesn’t take part in the election.

There are lots of people out in the world and in our community that like to raise a ruckus when city council or the school board does something they don’t like. Most, I like to believe, are law abiding, God fearing, voters. But for many that’s not true. Unfortunately, there are people who simply live to rail at the state of politics in general and local politics in particular while not bothering to vote.

They would like to be seen as players. But if you fail to vote you’re not really in the game. So what are we to think about the disparity in the number of voters who actually cast ballots?

Maybe the bigger problem is that no one came out to challenge any of the people seeking office. There were just enough candidates for the open positions, and for that reason not one of the candidates opted to purchase signs to announce their candidacy. Not needed so why spend the money.

I agree with that.

But what I would rather have seen is some other potential candidates stepping into the arena. We like to think of our elected officials as being battle hardened from the election process, but this time around there wasn’t much to the process.