Less than 18% of voters voted in this month’s special primary elections for the District 1 Comté supervisor, the final results published on Friday.
The mayor of Chula Vista, John McCann, and the mayor of Imperial Beach, Paloma Aguirre, qualified for a July runoff for the headquarters. McCann, a Republican, obtained approximately 42% of the votes and Aguirre, a democrat, around 32% – well in advance on the other five candidates of the race.
At a time when all the ballots were treated and the results certified on Friday, it was clear that 66,626 of the 370,000 registered voters of the district had voted by April 6 – for a participation of 17.8%.
The participation rate in the special elections is often low, but this participation rate was significantly lower than that of the special elections for the county supervisor in District 4 in 2023, which experienced a participation of 24.5%, said county officials.
But it is not the only election in the region that has experienced such a low participation rate in recent years. In a special electoral primary in 2022 in the assembly district 80, only about 16.4% of voters made ballots, according to the county participation data.
The defenders of the community had declared before the day of the ballot that the race posed specific challenges to the efforts to raise awareness of voters, because of its compressed calendar, its crowded field and the many other questions in competition for the attention of voters.
“With everything that happens in the political world, it was even more difficult to really highlight the importance of this election,” said Itzel Maganda Chavez, director of civic commitment for Alliance San Diego.
Originally published:
California Daily Newspapers
