Voter turnout in the 2022 Prince George Municipal Election improved slightly from four years ago, but still remains low.
Unofficial results show just 26.2% of the estimated 58,289 eligible voters in Prince George cast a ballot.
“We were all expecting in Prince George to be seeing higher voter turnout because people had great concerns about the fiscal situation of the city and various cost overruns,” said UNBC Political Science Lecturer Jason Morris.
“No doubt now, a lot of people are surprised that, largely, the incumbents were returned to office, perhaps based on their name recognition, or we’re getting mixed up in people that maybe make a lot of noise about politics, but it’s not representative of the population as a whole.”
Morris said a “lower voter turnout is a problem, because then we have elected representatives that lack some legitimacy for making important and often hard decisions.”
“It’s a frustrating research problem to learn why people are not voting enough. It’s certainly not hard, and this time we had four-years notice, one can register right at the voting station,” he explained.
Morris said it seems to be the case that people aren’t prioritizing political participation as much as they used to in the past.
There were a lot of candidates running for various offices in the Prince George area, including six people running to become Mayor, 20 people running for eight council spots, and 13 people running for five School Board Trustee spots.
Morris said it is possible that had voters feeling overwhelmed, because it would be a lot of research into all of the candidates and their platforms.
“At the same time, we’re a community that will spend an hour reading 45 Amazon reviews before buying a fridge magnet, and I would say that voting is a little more important,”
“When we have more candidates, there tends to be more interest, because each candidate has their own team and their supporters. Even if they’re a smaller, fringe kind of element, they’ve still got their friends and family to come out and vote for them.”
He said it’s hard to conceive of what more can be done by cities to get more people out to vote, beyond providing free transit, and and many voting stations and advanced ballots.
“Perhaps not getting a card in the mail like for other levels of government, is not reminding people the importance to vote,”
“We could put it on ourselves as a society to impress upon each other the importance of voting, and as well perhaps the candidates and their teams can do a better job of getting people to those voting stations.”
He added it would be worth looking at experimenting with online voting in Prince George.