As Omaha, Lincoln voters head to polls, debate reignites over low-turnout off-cycle city elections

By JEREMY TURLEY/Flatwater Free Press
Flatwater Free Press

Dave Richardson got his first taste of voting when his aunt Marjorie lifted him up to the polling booth and let him fill in the bubble next to Adlai Stevenson’s name on her 1952 presidential ballot.

For an 8-year-old infatuated with politics, it was “just like ice cream” — even though his chosen candidate fell short of winning the White House.

Now 80, the lifelong Omahan hasn’t missed an election since he came of legal voting age.

Growing up, “I was told that this voting thing was an obligation, not just a privilege,” Richardson said while fingering through campaign pins he’s collected through the decades.

But in February, the retired English teacher sat before a panel of Nebraska lawmakers and delivered an impassioned plea for fewer elections.

As voters in Omaha and Lincoln head to the polls this month, Richardson and an unlikely coalition of politicians are calling for future off-cycle city elections to be merged with the presidential ballot, which would boost turnout and save taxpayers money.

Most American cities hold off-cycle elections — a remnant of Progressive Era political machine busting — but efforts to increase voter participation have led Los Angeles, Phoenix, Baltimore and others to align city races with big-ticket elections in recent decades.

Local politicos have publicly debated whether to shift when Omahans go to the polls since at least the 1980s, but every time, an unmoving obstacle has cut discussions short: The city can’t dictate its own election calendar.

For more than a century, state law has required Omaha and Lincoln to hold municipal elections apart from statewide contests. Today, the cities are outliers in Nebraska — the only ones regularly putting on springtime elections in odd-numbered years.

A proposal in the Legislature would allow the cities to sync their local elections with even-numbered presidential years.

Coming off the scorched-earth slugfest for Nebraska’s “blue dot,” most Omaha voters are “so exhausted by politics that voting again is the furthest thing from their minds,” said State Sen. John Cavanaugh, who is leading the push to abandon off-cycle elections.

That voter fatigue translates to dismal turnout at off-cycle elections, making local government less representative of the general public, the Omaha Democrat said.

Fewer than half as many Omahans cast ballots in May local elections than in November presidential elections, according to a Flatwater Free Press analysis of voting data from 2009 to 2024.

Lincoln has seen a pronounced drop-off in turnout between local and statewide races too. Even when a hotly contested mayoral race drove a record 82,000 to the polls in 2023, it was dwarfed by a turnout of 140,000 the following year.

Administering separate elections also puts taxpayers on the hook to cover costs for printing ballots and wages for poll workers and other staffers.

Omaha spent nearly $1 million on its 2021 elections, and the city has budgeted $1.4 million to conduct this year’s contests. Lincoln, which holds municipal elections every odd-numbered year, footed a $500,000 bill in each of its last two cycles.

Moving the mayoral and city council races to a statewide ballot would save Omaha up to 65% of that each cycle, the Douglas County Election Commission estimates.

For Cavanaugh, harmonizing the elections is a no-brainer.

“It’s just more democratic and it costs less money,” he said. “You can’t go wrong.”

But supporters of the status quo, including Lincoln Mayor Leirion Gaylor Baird, think quite a bit can go wrong if local candidates have to swim in the same pool as presidential hopefuls.

Decoupling municipal and national elections gives local office-seekers “a puncher’s chance of getting voters’ attention,” said Alex Fall, a Lincoln native now working as a Democratic political consultant in Kansas.

If the elections were held all at once, it would incentivize local candidates to become more extreme and less focused on the nonpartisan objectives of city government, Fall said.

“I think it has a radicalizing effect on both the way the candidates campaign and also the kinds of candidates that can get traction with the public,” Fall said. “There’s not necessarily anything particularly exciting or particularly partisan about filling potholes, but you have to find a way to cut through the cacophony of everything else.”

Questioning the old ways

A half-dozen years after Nebraska achieved statehood, legislators decided to separate city elections from statewide ones.

An 1873 law required Omaha to hold annual spring elections for a slate of city officers, including a mayor, a marshal, a street commissioner and a “police judge.” Lawmakers eventually extended those terms to four years.

For Lincoln city officials, state lawmakers settled on the current every-odd-year election cycle in 1905.

The cities’ election schedules haven’t changed in decades, but a party-dividing debate has long simmered among Omaha leaders, with flare-ups following low-turnout local elections.

In 1987, Democratic City Councilman Fred Conley came out in favor of switching local elections to even-numbered years a day after he won reelection with only 12% turnout, according to an Omaha World-Herald article.

Mayors have gone both ways on the issue. Republican PJ Morgan backed a proposal for an even-year switchover that fizzled out in 1993. Democrat Jim Suttle advocated for keeping off-cycle elections at a legislative hearing in February.

Mayor Jean Stothert has long supported moving the city election and proposed a charter amendment to do so in 2013, though it never reached the ballot. The Republican still supports changing the schedule to boost turnout and save public money, a spokeswoman said.

John Ewing, her Democratic challenger in the May 13 election, feels the same way. Pointing to the state’s voter ID law as a potential barrier to participating in government, the Douglas County Treasurer said “we should be doing everything we can to increase voter turnout.”

A majority of the Omaha City Council opposes changing the election cycle, said Council President Pete Festersen.

There are pros and cons — voter turnout would rise, but important city issues would be overshadowed by louder presidential candidates, Festersen said. Ultimately, the Democrat prefers to keep independent city elections.

Gaylor Baird, the Democratic Lincoln mayor, hopes to retain odd-year elections in the capital city since local matters “would be subsumed by federal and state elections if they were held in the same election cycle,” said Chief of Staff Rick Hoppe.

Ordinary voters have also contemplated and formed opinions on the finer points of election timing.

Kyle Halgerson, a Google technical writer based in Omaha, said national politics is increasingly mired in culture wars and nasty interpersonal spats, but local government should remain centered on fundamentals like emergency services and urban development.

The inundation of campaign spending by presidential and statewide candidates would leave little oxygen for local office-seekers to get their messages out — something that already happens to down-ballot races in on-cycle elections, Halgerson said.

“In the November elections, how much attention are the judge candidates actually getting?” he said.

It’s valid to worry about an increase in “low-information voting” and roll-off, where voters leave some races blank, said Kevin Smith, a University of Nebraska-Lincoln political science professor. On the flip side, low-turnout elections can raise questions about whether the results are reflective of the broader public’s wishes, he said.

Cavanaugh discounted the concern about uninformed voters, saying citizens are sophisticated enough to make decisions in their best interest.

Money and power

If local candidates had to compete for attention with presidential heavyweights, they would need much more money to run ads on the crowded airwaves, said Fall, the Democratic consultant.

Most small donors are maxed out from supporting big candidates in those years, so local office-seekers would need personal wealth or the favor of special interests, narrowing the field and making city government less representative, Fall said.

But a handful of academic studies have found that off-cycle elections allow well-organized interest groups, like real estate developers and public employee unions, to wield disproportionate influence since turnout is muffled.

A 2021 research article found that off-cycle elections tend to drive local policymaking further from the average resident’s preferences and more in line with the goals of interest groups.

Cavanaugh said he sees the effect in Omaha, noting that the current system benefits “people who have business before the city,” namely police and firefighter unions and developers.

Omaha resident Nick Ziess, a software engineer, hears the concerns from both sides and hopes the city will take a middle road by aligning municipal elections with the even-year midterms.

That way there’s no presidential race to dominate the spotlight, but many more people will weigh in, Ziess said. On average, nearly 50% more Omahans have voted in midterm general elections than local contests since 2009.

But the Cavanaugh-backed bill would only allow Omaha to keep its current calendars or switch to presidential years. The proposal, part of an amendment to a larger election-themed bill, faces two more legislative votes before reaching the governor’s desk.

If it passes, Omaha and Lincoln could switch to even-year elections as soon as 2028 by making changes to their city charters.

Richardson, the retired teacher, has heard a common refrain when talking about the upcoming Omaha election with friends and neighbors: “Didn’t we just do this?” A few mentioned they didn’t plan to vote this time around.

A combined November ballot would cut down on voter fatigue and stem the low-turnout problem of a small number of people making choices for an entire city, he said.

“You’d have one big happy election,” Richardson said.

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This story was originally published by Flatwater Free Press and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.