With low public interest, do voters even know it’s election season?

Date: 9/18/2019

It’s election season, but clearly some people don’t know it.

Or they just don’t care.

Springfield, Chicopee, and Westfield are determining city councils and mayors this fall. The first preliminary election has been run in Springfield and look at the numbers for it. Out of the city’s 97,484 registered voters only 7,431 – or 7.62 percent – voted.

Chicopee and Westfield are having run-off elections as well. I’ll be curious to see what the numbers will be like.

In Springfield, City Councilor Jesse Lederman proposed a modest set of measures to alert people to the fact there is an election. Lederman wanted a postcard to be mailed out to voters as well as a series of signs around the city. The price tag would be $13,000 per election.

Mayor Domenic Sarno vetoed the ordinance earlier this summer and said, “Are we now talking about publicly financing campaigns – is that our next step? There are certainly a lot of unanswered questions. Is this now going to lead to other elections including special elections, referendum questions, and/or state elections, too?”

I understand the mayor was attempting to underscore the potential costs of such a measure, but the council overrode his veto. The ordinance has not yet been funded.

Lederman is right. We need to alert people. We can no longer assume in this society that everyone is on the same page.

Social media distracts people. Cable TV has steered viewers away from local programming. Local TV news generally shuns political coverage until there is an election.  Newspapers are “dead” (see the second part of this column, please). The “media” – as if all of us are in lockstep – has been portrayed by some as villains.

All of these elements have contributed to a weakening of understanding of local events and issues.

Just take a look at social media and see how people aren’t more than willing to re-post things that are true, accurate or complete.

To see more voters at the polls we have to do a better job engaging them – and when I mean “we” I mean the press and elected officials.

Residents have to take some responsibility for their own involvement and that doesn’t mean posting half-informed screeds on a community forum on Facebook or being indignant when they receive a tax bill.

If you actually care about tax rates, city services and other elements that directly and immediately make an impact on your lives, then vote.

As Mark Twain said in an interview with the Boston Transcript in 1905, “But in this country we have one great privilege which they don't have in other countries. When a thing gets to be absolutely unbearable the people can rise up and throw it off. That's the finest asset we’ve got – the ballot box.”
    
I’m not being very modest

My boss, the effervescent Fran Smith, forwarded the results of a study to me that I would like to share with you. It was originally reported on www.odwyerpr.com and it says something many of us have long thought.    

“The News Measures Research Project, a joint research initiative comprised of students and post-grads from Duke, UNC Chapel Hill and Rutgers, conducted a recent study of local media outlets (radio stations, TV stations, newspapers and online-only publishers) in randomly-sampled communities across the U.S. and analyzed the stories of each medium by multiple criteria to gauge the journalistic performance of each outlet type and determine what outlets are best meeting the informational needs of their communities.

“The study discovered that local newspapers significantly outperform local TV, radio and online-only outlets in terms of overall story output as well as their ability to produce journalistic content that was both original and local in nature.

“While local newspapers accounted for only about a quarter of the local media outlets in the study’s sample, the study discovered these publications were responsible for producing almost 60 percent of the stories researchers gathered that were of a local nature. Moreover, local papers also produced nearly half (47 percent) of all original news items they found as well.

“By contrast, only about 12 percent of local TV outlets’ output consisted of original stories. Local radio produced about 32 percent of original stories and online-only outlets produced less than 10 percent.”

Want to know what’s happening? Read a newspaper, preferably one of ours!