Tuesday is Town Election Day, and if past is prologue, fully 10-15 percent of Wakefield’s registered voters will exercise the right that President Jimmy Carter called, “the foundation of our democracy.”

The remaining 85-90 percent of you will be on social media railing about the condition of the roads, overdevelopment and wondering how we ended up with bike lanes.

The 10-15 percent turnout has been standard in Wakefield Town Elections for quite a while now. The only outlier in the current decade was the 2021 Town Election, when, at the height of COVID, more than 26 percent of the voters went to the polls to tell the School Committee to keep the traditional Warrior logo.

School Committee members defied the will of the people and cancelled the 74-year-old logo anyway.

Voter turnout has been in decline ever since.

In 2022, about 17 percent of registered voters in Wakefield participated in the Town Election. In 2023, it was down to 13 percent. In both the 2024 and 2025 Town Elections, only about 11 percent of registered voters bothered to exercise this “core civil right.”

If you are one of the few who does plan to vote on Tuesday, don’t worry. You won’t be asked to show identification. The “foundation of our democracy” is based on the honor system. If you say you’re John Smith from Salem Street, who are we to question?

Despite the fact that every imaginable kind of fraud is running rampant these days, we are expected to believe that our wide-open voting system is the one area of human life that somehow remains untainted. There are people in this world who think nothing of scamming little old ladies out of their life savings. But we are supposed to believe that fraudsters who would steal your Social Security just have too much respect for Our Democracy to steal an election. That’s where they draw the line.

Another thing you don’t have to worry about – at least this year – is children voting.

The Wakefield Youth Council has been pushing to lower the voting age in municipal elections to 16. They had hoped to bring a measure to the spring Annual Town Meeting, but the kiddos decided to hold off until the Regular Town Meeting in the fall.

As one member explained at a recent Youth Council meeting, the May 4 Annual Town Meeting coincides with school exams, “when most of us will be, like, studying or taking tests or, like, sleeping, basically.”

Sounds grueling. When will they ever find time to register and vote?

Don’t tell the geriatric ‘No Kings’ protesters, but decisions made by local elected officials have far more impact on your life than any president ever will. Yet voter turnout in president elections far exceeds that of municipal elections.

Newsflash: The president isn’t going to fix the roads, prevent bike lanes or control overdevelopment.

Only the people you elect next Tuesday can do that.
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[This column originally appeared in the April 23, 2026 Wakefield Daily Item.]