Comment | Uncontested races pose accountability issues

The last general election in Kentucky featured mayoral races for some 353 cities – over 80 percent of all municipalities in the state. However, voters in the majority of these cities were essentially unable to cast ballots for this race, not because they didn’t make it to the polls on that November day in 2014, but because their ballot presented them with no choice for this office. Mayoral candidates ran unopposed.

Indeed, 207 of the 353 cities holding mayoral contests that day – nearly 60 percent – had just one mayoral candidate on their ballots. A resident’s only options was to vote for that person or simply not vote.

Even when there is more than one candidate, mayoral elections in Kentucky tend not to be competitive, with the average margin of victory at around 20 percentage points in the November 2014 elections.

Voting matters. So, too, does the presence of candidates. Citizens’ willingness to actually run for and hold local office is critical, yet largely an overlooked indicator of the health of local democracy. By this measure, municipal government in Kentucky appears to be in crisis.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the Louisville/Jefferson County Metro government’s suburbs. While the incidence of unopposed elections is high in suburbs in general (more than two-thirds of mayoral contests were uncontested between 2010-2014), it is the suburbs of the metro government where the lack of challengers is most troubling. Here, an astonishing 84 percent of mayoral races – 68 of the 81 incorporated municipalities in Jefferson County – did not include competitors in the November 2014 election.

Under most consolidated governments, there is a single, centralized general-purpose local authority that provides services for the vast majority of residents. However, the Louisville-Jefferson County Metro government (like the Indianapolis-Marion County Unigov in Indiana) is a partial consolidation since it left suburban municipal governments intact. The decision to retain these municipalities was no doubt a compromise that assuaged the fears of suburbanites at the time of consolidation. However, it has left a class of cities with very light competition and a questionable raison d'être.

The lack of contested elections is likely to create accountability problems. For example, there is little defense against corrupt officials when competition, and therefore public attention to municipal government, is so low. This is not to say that corruption is an issue for mayors of these suburban municipalities within Jefferson County. However, without competitive elections, there are fewer mechanisms to safeguard against corruption.

Perhaps steps should be taken to increase political awareness in the metro government suburbs about the widespread problem of uncontested mayoral elections. Maybe powers should be extended to these cities so that their governments become more important, thereby attracting both the civic-minded and the progressively ambitious to seek public office. Alternatively, perhaps the suburban city governments within the Louisville-Jefferson County Metro have outlived their utility and the time has come abolish them.

Melissa Marschall is a political science professor at Rice University and director of the Kinder Institute for Urban Research's Center for Local Elections in American Politics. John Lappie is a post-doctoral fellow at the Center for Local Elections in American Politics. To read more about mayoral elections, see theirreport, "Mayoral Elections in Kentucky 2010-2014," available atkinder.rice.edu/reports.