It’s already clear who will win in the city’s Primary Election next month.
Every candidate is unopposed.
But the election must go on — and it will cost taxpayers about $540,000.
In the Aug. 25 election, members of each political party, and independent voters who opted to choose a party ballot, will select candidates for mayor and City Council member in Wards 1, 2 and 4. The winners advance to the Nov. 3 General Election.
The city moved to a vote-by-mail system in 2011 to save money and improve voter turnout. It was also facing an order from the U.S. Department of Justice to make polling places accessible to disabled people.
Before vote-by-mail elections, it was a common practice for the city to combine precincts in wards that had no contested positions and open a single polling place in each ward to save money.
A normal polling-place Primary Election with contested races used to cost about $740,000, said city clerk administrator Suzanne Mesich. The city had to hire staff and pay for tables and chairs, voting booths and signs.
This year, the City Clerk’s Office is expecting to spend about $540,000 and will save money by stuffing envelopes and mailing the ballots in-house instead of outsourcing that job, she said.
Ballots were printed in June, and 155,000 will be mailed to active voters on Aug. 5. That includes 8,500 registered independents who told the city they wanted either a Democratic or Republican ballot.
Many of those ballots won’t be returned. The average voter turnout for city primary elections with uncontested races is 12.7 percent.
The cost and the turnout raise interesting questions the city should consider in future election cycles as it tries to be deliberate in the way it manages elections, said City Council Member Karin Uhlich.
“The City adopted an all vote-by-mail system in 2011, and we made it clear we’ll be very reluctant to ever cede that system/approach again in the future,” she said in a newsletter in June.
Pima County Recorder F. Ann Rodriguez said vote-by-mail elections are cheaper because they’re less labor-intensive and voter turnout is typically higher.
Even if the city opened polling places instead of mailing a ballot to every active voter, the city still would have had to mail ballots to city voters on the permanent early voter list, she said.
As of April, about 62 percent of registered voters in the city had signed up to be on the list, she said.
