By Cindy Elmore, Ph.D.

GREENVILLE (September 7, 2023) – Every fall semester, I put Election Day on my syllabus calendar.

Students always eagerly hope this means class is cancelled that day. It isn’t. Instead – just as I don’t want busy students to forget their upcoming quiz and assignment dates – I’m hoping they won’t forget about their civic duty to vote.

Yet, realistically, in a year like this one, when it is only the municipal candidates who are up for election, most of them won’t bother. 

Neither will most voters.

One of the reasons is that most people know nothing about local candidates for local offices. If they vote at all, it is generally on the basis of some vague name recognition or yard signs – not on whether a candidate believes whatever a voter believes when it comes to the direction, management and priorities for the place where he or she lives.

I’ve been one of those voters who could find out little about the candidates for office in the place where I live. I’m also a professor of journalism who closely follows the continuing spread of “news deserts” – places where there are no newspapers left to keep voters informed about such candidates.

Even where a local newspaper is still in operation, staffs have been slashed so much and readership is so low that most would-be voters are still in the dark on an election day when no national candidates are on the ballot. Paywalls prevent them from accessing what coverage there is.

So in 2020, a colleague and I applied for East Carolina University funding to create a website with information about local candidates for office in our county. We had enough funds that first year for billboards and bus shelter ads to lead people to our nonpartisan website, www.voter411enc.org.

All county and municipal candidates in Pitt County were contacted with the same set of questions about their backgrounds, priorities, and things like how they planned to involve constituents in the process of making decisions. We never asked about political party, nor did any candidates mention it.

We also included candidates seeking to represent portions of our county in the state legislature. Opposing candidates who participated were shown side by side so that a voter could read about and compare them simultaneously.

Our reach wasn’t huge, but in an election where some county races were decided by fewer than 500 votes, it’s possible that our website made a difference to the outcome. In 2021, the last time there was a municipal election, only 2,825 people voted in all of Pitt County. We had a website then, too, and are now in the midst of contacting the 61 municipal candidates running for office in our county this year.  

We believe there’s a place for other colleges and universities to take up the cause of providing local candidate information, particularly in North Carolina’s many rural counties. Even in urban areas, it would be great for voters to be able to go to a single, branded, trusted, free source of nonpartisan local candidate information online that would counter the misinformation that abounds elsewhere.

For those who say that state-funded institutions shouldn’t be involved in politics, there is long precedent for this nonpartisan work. Universities have been conducting and publishing highly respected, nonpartisan election polls for decades – think of polls from Elon, Quinnipiac and ECU. Both activities fit with the mission of most universities to provide civic engagement and service to the communities that surround them.

Providing local candidate information where there is none also helps to reinforce to our students the importance of voting locally. Whether they know it yet or not, many of the things they most care about are decided there.

So as Nov. 7 approaches, I’ll remind my students that they can’t complain about things that go on locally if they don’t vote in local elections. And then I’ll send them to our website. And to class.

Cindy Elmore is a journalism professor at ECU’s School of Communication and a longtime former journalist.