Photo by ericschoon

Photo by ericschoon

As noted throughout the day, Tuesday’s Democratic primary election had a particularly low voter turnout. But just how bad was it? With 83,040 registered D.C. voters casting a ballot —just 22.5 percent—this Democratic mayoral primary had the lowest voter turnout in two decades.

While the D.C. Board of Elections only provides stats for elections dating back to 1992 on its website, the Post was kind enough to publish dates beginning in 1982. At the Kennedy Recreation Center voting precinct yesterday, Councilmember Jack Evans (D-Ward 2) told DCist he thought voter turnout was the lowest since he got into local politics in the ’80s. Still not convinced? Just take a gander at these numbers:

2014: 83,040 voters, or 22.5 percent.

2010: 137,586 voters, or 37.14 percent.

2006: 109,781 voters, or 34.19 percent.

2002: 104,001 voters, or 34.48 percent.

1998: 95,624 voters, or 32.1 percent.

1994: 149,457 voters, or 49.1 percent.

If you want to see just how few people voted to nominate Bowser yesterday, check out this chart from former DCist editor Ben Freed.

These numbers bring up the lingering, probably unanswerable question of why so few people voted yesterday. Evans said that he thinks it’s because of the new primary election date, which has thrown people off. Mayor Vince Gray also thinks that, saying in his concession speech yesterday that he thought moving it to April was a “bad idea.” He also blamed the weather for a low voter turnout. Not yesterday’s weather, specifically, but the cold, snowy weather we had in March.

At Evans’ watch party last night, he said he wants to pass omnibus election legislation that would, among other things, change the April primary election date. At her press conference this afternoon, Democratic mayoral nominee Muriel Bowser also didn’t have any solid answer as to why the voter turnout was so low this year.

Last month, the Post wrote that D.C.’s “young newcomers”—I think they’re called “millennials,” or something—could swing the election, but only if they decided to vote. It’s hard to know if a majority of D.C.’s “young newcomers” made it out to the polls yesterday, but I talked to a lot of friends who could be qualified as “young newcomers” to see if they voted and found out that most of them did not. As it turns out, a lot of them haven’t changed their voting registration over from the states or cities they moved here from, despite relocating to D.C. within the past five years.

At Evans’ watch party last night, I talked to two young volunteers who had voted before electioneering at the Reeves Center. One of them told me the most frequently asked question she got while volunteering was that people “didn’t know where to go vote.”

Recently, the D.C. Board of Elections realigned the voting precincts. There are 143 voting precincts in D.C., and as the first election with this new realignment, that could have caused some problems.

Considering all that, why was the voter turnout so low yesterday? Pick a reason, I guess.

Filed Under: d.c. board of elections, dcision14, voting,