At the University of Michigan, politics can feel loud enough to shake the ground — Diag rallies between classes, student organizations breaking down news on Instagram, debate watch parties that spill late into the night. But when the stakes turn local — who sits on the Ann Arbor City Council, how transit is funded, how safety is handled, how Ann Arbor actually feels day to day — participation falls off sharply. This participation gap isn’t best explained by what students believe; it’s explained by whether students show up.
In 2020, the University’s student voting rates hit 78%, up from 60% in 2016. Students can clearly mobilize when the election is highly significant and socially unavoidable. Even more recently, in the 2024 general election, the University’s two Campus Voting Hubs saw nearly 15,000 ballots cast by students and other campus voters, roughly triple the engagement seen at the same locations in 2022. This engagement wasn’t just driven by national-level political attention — the University and local partners made voting easier through concrete infrastructure, including a city clerk satellite office at the University of Michigan Museum of Art that helped register 5,412 voters and collect 8,501 ballots.
In contrast with an odd-year local election in 2017, Ann Arbor’s 1st Ward, 1st Precinct — a small voting district near the University of Michigan — recorded a 0.3% turnout, with just 7 ballots out of 2,409 registered voters in that precinct. This number is a signal flare, showing that in local elections that attract little public attention or sense of urgency, participation can collapse so dramatically that the electorate becomes too small to reflect the population it is meant to represent.
One reason for this collapse is that timing and salience are stacked against student participation. Ann Arbor’s city elections run on an August to November rhythm in even years, with primaries held in August when necessary. This schedule is out of tandem with the student calendar, as many students are navigating summer sublets, out-of-state internships, moving weeks, travel and the mental reset around Thanksgiving break. These logistics introduce small but persistent frictions — uncertain addresses, disrupted routines, missed mail — that can turn an intention to vote into something postponed and, eventually, forgotten. Even when students are in town, local elections can be easy to miss, competing with classes, jobs and national political coverage that often draws attention away from local issues.
Another reason is that many students do not feel anchored to Ann Arbor politics. Many students, especially those from out of state, don’t experience Ann Arbor as a long-term “home” in the way that year-round residents do. This changes the psychology of participation. Research on political behavior shows that people who feel less rooted in a community are less likely to participate in its politics, while stronger local attachment is associated with more consistent voting. If students are unsure whether they “should” vote in Ann Arbor or back home, that uncertainty can easily devolve into inaction.
A third factor is that local ballots are often more confusing than national ones. Unlike national elections, where party cues and constant media coverage offer clear shortcuts for voters, many of Ann Arbor’s most important local contests lack the same shared context. Voters often ignore down-ballot contests or nonpartisan offices when unfamiliar with the choices, a well-known phenomenon in election science called ballot roll-off, and participation in local and off-cycle elections is much lower than in presidential or federal races.
The decision not to vote is not a moral indictment. It is a predictable outcome in a system that assumes stable residency, attention and routines — none of which are guaranteed in student life. Ann Arbor has created formal channels for student input. The Student Advisory Council, established by a City Council resolution in 2017, provides a structured venue for student research, recommendations and dialogue with city officials, and its work is regularly presented to the Council. But advisory bodies are not substitutes for voting power. Their influence depends on whether elected officials choose to act on their recommendations, and there is little public evidence that those recommendations have been formally adopted into city policy. When student participation at the ballot box remains low, advisory councils allow students to offer input without the leverage that comes from being a meaningful share of the electorate.
Ann Arbor has also tried to address turnout structurally, as in 2017, when the City Council passed a resolution establishing regular city elections in November of each even year beginning in 2018. This kind of reform reflects a real recognition that off-cycle elections experience lower turnout. But, as long as key contests — like August primaries that often determine the final outcome of an election — still occur when few students are paying attention, the participation problem remains.
If low turnout is a structural problem, then the response has to be structural as well. The solution isn’t to tell students to care more, but to make participation easier by clarifying what matters, when decisions are made and how students can actually act on their preferences.
Ann Arbor should take the lead by funding a student-targeted, nonpartisan local election guide: a short, digestible guide — digital and physical — built around the questions students most often face and placed directly in student-heavy spaces like campus-area apartments, dorm mailrooms, bus stops and civic hubs. Student organizations could also play a supporting role by coordinating a campus-wide local ballot week before each city election and circulating this information through listservs, social media and in-person outreach. The goal is not to shape students’ views, but to make local ballots clear enough for students to take tangible action.
These solutions have already been applied in the Ann Arbor community. As the 2020 election demonstrated, when voting infrastructure is made visible and convenient on campus, student turnout increases dramatically.
Surveys find that a significant share of Americans report engaging with political or social issues on social media suggesting that online activism and advocacy are meaningful dimensions of civic engagement today. However, these forms of engagement don’t replace participation in the institutions that set the rules that govern student life. When student turnout disappears during local elections, decisions about housing, transit, safety and development fall to a much narrower — and often much older — subset of Ann Arbor residents that then makes decisions for those younger students.
Since the real divide is participation, the most important political work on campus is making local democracy easier to see, understand and participate in. When students do participate in local elections, the effects are concrete: Their presence changes who local officials expect to hear from and whose concerns are treated as politically relevant. Just as importantly, local elections are often where people first learn whether their involvement matters at all. Participation builds on itself. When students see that their votes affect their own lives, they are more likely to carry that expectation of accountability beyond campus.
Alexander Voorhees is an Opinion Columnist who explores how national politics and institutions shape campus life and democratic legitimacy. He can be reached at avoorh@umich.edu.
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