Voter turnout in Golden hit a new low in this year’s municipal election, at only 23.1 per cent.
That is nearly half as many people as the previous municipal election in 2014, where 43 per cent of Golden’s population participated.
The difference could be that there were only seven people running for six council seats, and no mayoral competition.
“It is pretty low. The last election, we had a mayoral election as well,” said Town of Golden chief election officer Viv Thoss.
This year also marked the first election with electronic voting machines. Voters were given their voting card, and once they made their selections, they put it into a machine, that tracked the numbers. At the end of the night, it was as simple as collecting the data from the machines for the results.
“We heard a lot of feedback that people were generally pleased, and talked about how easy and fast it was,” Thoss said. “That’s anecdotally what I heard.”
The Town of Golden election team spent months leading up to the election advertising for the municipal voting day. Thoss says they put advertisements in the newspaper, on the radio, Facebook, and more.
“This year, the election team was able to provide more communications to the community than ever before,” Thoss said. “There was just more communication, we just wanted to get the message out there. We actually did more than ever before because now we have a dedicated position to communications.”
Leading up to the election and on election day, Thoss says she is happy with how the entire process went.
“The election team worked hard through a very long day to provide fantastic and friendly service to our voters. Our team did their very best to make the voter experience easy and as stress free to the pubic,” Thoss said.
