The Daily Orange

The voter honeymoon is over.

Despite having an open seat for mayor for the first time in eight years in the city of Syracuse, residents are showing little interest.

"We had lines out the ying-yang last year," said Ed Ryan, commissioner at the Office of Onondaga County Board of Elections, about the number of people who turned out to register to vote in 2008. "Nobody came around this year."

The election of President Barack Obama boosted voter registration numbers across the country, raising the Onondaga County count over 75 percent.

"There are 290,000 citizens registered," Ryan said, "and about only 110,000 will vote."

The mayoral election in Syracuse is a three-horse race: Common Councilor-at-Large Stephanie Miner is the choice of the Democratic party; Steve Kimatian, a former NewsChannel 9 executive, is running on the Republican ticket; and Otis Jennings, former commissioner of Parks, Recreation and Youth Programs has picked up the Conservative Party line.

Despite the potential for making history, as Syracuse has never had a female or black mayor, election talk is barely above a murmur this year.

"This race is as low key a mayoral race as I've seen in my 40 years here," said Robert McClure, a professor of political science at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University.

McClure cites an overall decline of newspapers, television stations and political parties as reason for public disinterest.

"As all these institutions crumble, the mechanisms that make elections visible and meaningful - as they crumble, the election itself becomes more hidden, less meaningful," he said.

McClure said he thinks the Internet has hindered the electoral process, despite making candidate information easily accessible.

"As I understand the modern media environment, it disaggregates," McClure said. "It slices people up into narrower and narrower niches. That's at some level, anti-democratic, it's anti-collective."

Continued...

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