Election Day on Nov. 4, 2025, once again showed how few people vote when the presidency isn’t on the ballot. In Atlanta and across Georgia, voters chose mayors, school board members and city council members, as well as seats in the statewide Public Service Commission runoff. Despite this, just one in five registered Georgia voters cast a ballot statewide.
Over the last two decades, American voters have followed a consistent trend. Despite national turnout being among the highest in history, with the 2020 presidential election at 66% turnout and 2024 nearly as high at 64%, local turnout has not followed. In mayoral, municipal and local races, participation is often significantly less than that of federal elections. In fact, Atlanta’s participation rate was just 22% of registered voters.
While many argue that this occurs because voting at a higher level matters more, the reality is that local elections represent and affect the voters far more within their day-to-day lives. Schools, streets, policing, zoning, water and transit are all decided by local governments. That’s why a mayor or council race with low turnout can still determine how a neighborhood is policed next year, whether rents rise after a zoning change, or how quickly a broken sidewalk gets fixed.
Additionally, election timing helps explain the low turnout rates. When city elections are held “on-cycle” with state or federal elections, turnout is far higher than when they’re off-cycle. If people are going to show up to vote anyway, those races should be put on the same days as the big ones. People might as well cast a local vote too. They might even do some research.
While the national turnout has significantly increased, it may not be for the right reasons. Part of the increase is powered by polarization. A study on Americans in 2020 reported that nearly a third of voters cast their presidential vote as more “against” the other candidate than “for” their own. With the current political tension, voters may be more likely to vote against the national candidate they saw in a bad clip on social media or the news. According to Pew Research, more voters in each party view the other with open contempt. This climate raises the perceived stakes and pulls more people into presidential elections.
In the 1960s, voters were more likely to make their voices heard in local elections. This period was marked by stronger local news coverage and higher neighborhood-level connections. For example, in 1965, New York City saw a staggering mayoral turnout of more than 80% — a rate which hasn’t been matched since.
Still, there is some hope. The recent mayoral election of Zohran Mamdani resulted in more than two million voters citywide, the highest New York City turnout in over 50 years. That’s what can happen when voters are excited and when a race is competitive and highly visible in a moment of national hate and gridlock. Even so, fewer than 40% of the city’s nearly five million registered voters participated.
However, in Atlanta in 2021, the last time the city picked a mayor, fewer than 100,000 ballots were cast. While it may sound like a lot, that’s just 25.1% of active registrants who chose to fulfill their democratic obligation. This year, statewide, just around one in five Georgians did the same.
This year’s pattern was no different: an insignificant early-vote share, silence in too many precincts and a December runoff kept the electorate modest in size.
Election Day once again showed that voters are neglecting local elections even while flocking to presidential cycles. That gap is bad for representation. It’s bad for the people. It’s best if municipal elections become aligned with even-year cycles and we keep expanding convenient voting options, like advance and mail-in voting, that raise participation in high-turnout years. We can’t keep letting small groups of voters decide entire communities. Local races need to be put at the center of the press like they decide people’s lives — because they do.
