Election Day in Philadelphia came with pretty sparse turnout on a beautiful day. I was home sick from work, which kind of made me miss the days when my house was the polling place. On the other hand, I didn’t have to clean my garage.
On the one hand the sparse turnout is no surprise, since there was very little chance that Michael Nutter was going to lose his re-election bid. After the Philadelphia Republican Party couldn’t beat John Street in two tries, it’s kind of given up on the mayor’s races.
On the flip side, I’m checking out election results at Philadelphia’s unofficial reporting site, and it looks like the last City Council at-large race is going to be decided by about 1000-1500 votes. In a city of a million people, that’s a pretty tiny margin, and if a determined group had wanted to they might have been able to control who won that last seat. (On a side note, I’ve spent most of the last 25 years trying to remember that Brian O’Neill is my councilman and Denny O’Brien is my state representative. Now they’re both my councilman because O’Brien gave up the state House for an at-large council seat.)
There was also a race for the City Commissioners’ office. The City Commissioners are officially in charge of running elections in the city, and it looks like two of the three members have been voted out this year – one in the primary, and one tonight. A small but significant number of people voted for mayor – an election that was high profile but never really in doubt – but not for commissioner – a race that got much less attention but was much closer, at least for the third and final seat on the board. And since that position will influence elections for the next four years, there was a lot of bang for the buck to be had in that election.
On the other hand, some people make the argument that we should have voters select lower-profile officials like that – the nominations get swept up in party politics because no one is really paying attention, and it costs the city money to go through the election process anyway. Maybe, at least for now, we would be better off with fewer offices to vote for so we could pay more attention to each one.