LETTER TO THE EDITOR
First comes the exhilaration. Then comes the crash.
Why exhilaration? It’s almost election time in San Marcos. We’ll be electing two City Council members in November – the Place 1 seat and the Place 2 seat.
And we have no absence of candidates. For the Place 1slot, there are two candidates. And for Place 2? There are five! In both races, the incumbents are seeking reelection. This represents some serious civic engagement on the part of the seven individuals seeking to gain or retain office.
This is a good thing. It offers San Marcos voters choices. It encourages debate among voters and among the candidates. And it requires candidates to understand the issues, consider solutions within the context of available resources, and to offer their best ideas as part of the pre-election conversation.
If previous municipal elections are a guide, we can expect to hear about some of the issues that never seem to go away. Protecting the river. Poverty. Traffic. Roads. Crime. Downtown parking. Equitable distribution of city services. Better relations between the city and the university. And taxes—there are always taxes. That’s a tough issue in a city where the largest employer is also the largest landowner and pays no taxes.
Simply hearing about those issues is not enough. We should expect our candidates to be familiar with each of them and prepared to engage with voters, with each other, with those who are not on the ballot but may bring unique insight to a particular issue. How often have we heard a candidate tell us, “I’m a consensus builder”? Easy to say. Harder to do. The best time to begin demonstrating this is during the campaign. Show us what you’ve got. Don’t just talk about it.
And don’t skip out on a debate. That sends a powerful message—and not a good one—about your respect for voters and your readiness to face the issues.
So, yes, I’m exhilarated. Plenty of candidates. Plenty of ideas. Plenty of potential. Plenty of passion. Plenty of forums for candidates to make their cases. This is good for the city.
But, as I said earlier, first comes the exhilaration. Then comes the crash.
Why the crash? Because with history as our guide, we can expect about nine out of ten San Marcos voters to ignore this election. In both the 2021 and 2023 municipal elections, the turnout rate was slightly below 10 percent. Projecting that figure to the current electorate of 46,000 registered voters, we can expect about 4,500 voters to turn out for November’s municipal election.
So what’s the problem? The candidates? The voters? The issues? Nope, it’s not that at all. It’s timing of our elections.
We hold City Council elections every year, with two of our six council seats in play each cycle, and the mayor every second year. Invariably, the turnout is abysmal in the odd-numbered years, with nothing else to draw voters to the polls other than a laundry list of Texas constitutional amendments—there will 17 this year—and a dozen city charter amendments. Very few voters have the time or the resources to research each of them. This strongly works against turnout in downballot races, such as City Council.
But the turnout issue is completely different in even-numbered years. In the 2022 San Marcos municipal election, with 19,753 total ballots cast, the turnout rate increased almost fivefold over 2021, to 42.53%. The improvement was even more striking in 2024: 28,414 total ballots were cast, for a turnout rate of 59.12 percent of San Marcos voters.
With no offense meant to any of our council candidates, we’re forced to accept a situation in which we elect one candidate with as few as 2,075 votes (odd year) and another with 13,187 votes (even year). Some might argue that it’s the quality of the candidates. Of course, the candidate’s positions matter, but the larger issue is the timing of the election. It’s the primary source of the problem and we’ve got to deal with it.
Yes, the drivers of oddand even-year election turnout are different. Depending on a particular even-year cycle, voters are asked to choose among candidates for president, congress, governor, state officials, state legislatures, judges, and countywide positions.
Looking deeper into one of the 2023 City Council races, the undervote— voters who chose not to cast a ballot in a particular race—came to 1,039, about 25 percent of the cast ballots in that race. In another recent City Council election, the undervote exceeded the number of votes received by one of the two candidates. It’s certainly not unreasonable to consider an undervote as a stand in for “none of the above.” Whether this is due to lack of information about the candidates or a disinclination to select either, it certainly underlines the fact that with so little voter participation in offyear elections, we need to find a solution for increased voter participation in all aspects of City Council races.
Depending on the cycle in which a council candidate runs for election, it’s easy to make the case that a candidate can, in a very real sense, limit risk and choose their voters rather than the other way around.
The turnout rate tells us when voters come out and when they don’t. As a society that places great value on voter engagement, it’s our job to meet the voters where they are—not where we’d prefer them to be. And if that means changing the City Council election cycle to bring more voters into the process, it’s a good place to start.
The San Marcos City Charter governs termlength and election cycles for elected city positions. The Charter is not inviolable. It can be changed to eliminate the off-year falloff problem. This can mean holding all elections in even-numbered years, and adjusting term lengths and term cycles to support the greater voter turnout it can drive.
Recognizing a problem and addressing it is far better than recognizing a problem and shrugging it off. At a time when voters are expressing increasing concern about limitations on democracy, we have the opportunity to increase voter participation. Let’s take it.
Sincerely, Jon Leonard San Marcos
