It’s the Saturday after Election Day, and I’ve been thinking about why people don’t vote in local elections. The answer, I think, is baked right into how local politics works, and how we talk about it.

Earlier this week, KUOW aired a “Sound Politics” episode that tried to untangle one piece of that puzzle: why school board elections in Washington are so confusing. It was a fascinating conversation about how state law allows school districts to run elections differently, but it got tangled up in language, using “city” and “school district” as if they were the same thing.

In Seattle, for example, school board candidates must live in specific “director districts,” but every registered voter citywide gets to vote for all of them in the general election. This unusual system exists only because Seattle’s population tops 400,000, a threshold that triggers a special rule in state law. Smaller districts like Highline and Tacoma operate differently.

It’s a great civics lesson, but also a perfect example of how confusing our systems can be. One of my broader theories about elections is simple: if people don’t understand the choices in front of them, they often just don’t vote. When confusion is built into the very structure of our elections, turnout doesn’t just sag, it sinks.

What bothered me about the KUOW piece wasn’t the reporting, but the terminology. Mixing up “school district” and “city” only deepens the public’s misunderstanding. I’ve seen this confusion play out locally in Olympia, where the city, the school district, and the port district all share the same name but have completely different boundaries. In Seattle, it’s even more complicated: the school district’s governance depends on the city’s population, even though the two are technically separate entities.

This is a microcosm of a much larger problem: state law makes local government more complicated than it needs to be. And that complexity collides with how we communicate about elections, especially in odd-numbered years when only local offices are on the ballot.

Another Sound Politics episode this week encouraged listeners to send it to “procrastinating voters.” It was a nice idea. Except that, unless you lived in the 26th Legislative District, Seattle, or King County, only one segment of the show actually applied to you. Even within those areas, it covered just a fraction of what was on people’s ballots.

That’s not a dig at the reporters, though they might have oversold it a bit (“Send this to someone who hasn’t voted in Western Washington, or, you know, anywhere in Washington…”). The truth is, no local NPR station (even in Seattle) could possibly cover the hundreds of races happening across dozens of cities, school districts, and special districts.

Think of it this way: Bellevue, Kent, Renton, Federal Way, Kirkland, Redmond, and Auburn together have about the same population as Seattle. If election coverage were proportional, those cities together would get the same attention as Seattle. But they don’t. There are simply too many races, so coverage outside Seattle gets rounded down to zero. The result: even more focus on Seattle, even less on everyone else.

And as local print newspapers and radio newsrooms continue their slow decline, the information gap just keeps widening.

The biggest reason people don’t vote locally isn’t apathy (which would be an internal flaw) it’s confusion (caused externally). Don’t blame voters for not turning in ballots, blame the system we’ve created. The system is hard to understand, and the information needed to make sense of it is vanishing.

The Texting Election

This year, I’ve had more friends than ever ask why they’re being bombarded with campaign texts. The short answer: vote, and they’ll stop. If your name is not on a list of people who voted, the campaigns are going to keep on bugging you.

Anecdotally, it seems that local campaign texting is way up. It makes sense. Texting is personal and intrusive, but it’s also cheap. In a low-turnout year, every vote is precious, and traditional media reach is limited. When you’re voting for everyone from park commissioners to city council members, odds are you haven’t heard much about any of them through your normal news sources. So campaigns reach past the media and straight into your phone. It’s not elegant, but it’s effective.

What “All Politics Is Local” Really Means

All of a sudden, there is a popular saying now that “all politics is national.” It reflects how the presidency and federal politics loom over everything. That’s true, to a degree. Since the television era, local election turnout has steadily declined compared to national races.

But when Rep. Tip O’Neill said “all politics is local,” he wasn’t talking about turnout rates. He meant that good politics starts with understanding your community, and connecting those local needs to national decisions.

Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez captured that spirit recently when she said she “just refused to let this race be nationalized. It’s not about the message. It’s about my loyalty to my community.” 

And if you zoom out and look at this week’s results from New Jersey, Virginia, and New York City, you can see that dynamic playing out. Each place faces the same national currents, but each community came up with its own answer.

Simplify the System, Raise the Turnout

If we want better turnout in Washington, we should start by making local government simpler. I don’t have a perfect fix, but I know that when voters look at their ballots and think, *“What the hell am I even voting for?”* those ballots are more likely to end up in the kitchen recycling bin.

All politics is local. But if we keep making “local” this complicated, we shouldn’t be surprised when fewer people show up to participate.