We continue on from yesterday’s post talking about some good advice from Bill Walczak…

That one was about how to repair the police (repairing instead of “defunding”); this one is about how to repair the election process in Boston, which suffers badly from voter suppression. (We’re referring to the second half of Walczak’s article.)

I hear you say “But there is no voter suppression in Boston! That’s all in Georgia and Florida!”

Well, yes and no. Of course it’s not just Georgia and Florida, it’s in most other Republican-controlled states as well. But what about Massachusetts? It’s true that we don’t have intentional voter suppression. We don’t have an attempt to suppress any particular group of voters. But look at the stats, as Walczak presents them:

If you prefer visual representations, you might find the graphic shown above these numbers in the original article easier to grok, though there’s a reason I’m not doing that at the moment. In either case, what’s striking is the abysmal numbers in 2011, 2015, 2017, and 2019. Listed here, it immediately jumps out at you that these are odd numbers. And why do we have city elections in odd-numbered years? Read Walczak’s article to find out. For now, just consider how much better we would surely be doing if Boston elections were moved to even-numbered years, like state and Federal elections.

So this is not voter suppression in the “traditional” sense, but we still have embarrassingly low turnouts. If you live in Boston, do you vote in municipal elections?

Categories: Dorchester/Boston