So many choices! Why civic elections can overwhelm voters

More than 50 people are in the race for 13 spots on Thunder Bay city council. The wealth of choices can be enough to make your head spin. And it can also cause voters to disengage. 

"There definitely are a lot of candidates to sift through," said Ashleigh Quarrell, who voted early in an advance poll.

"I'm somebody who does put a lot of research into my decision-making around politics, and so [I] spent a lot of time doing that," she said. 

Not everyone is willing to make that kind of effort to get to know the candidates.

"People are just not willing to spend the time, which tends to mean that voter turnout declines," said Robert Williams, professor emeritus of political science at the University of Waterloo.

Williams noted that municipal politics can present voters with more difficult decisions than federal or provincial politics. 

"At the federal and provincial level, not only is there some screening that goes on to limit your choices to one person from each party, but those candidates, if you will, are each wearing a team jersey."

"At the municipal level, that doesn't happen," said Williams. "They're one-person parties. From the voter's point of view, that becomes enormously difficult."

Voters turn to name recognition, "undervoting"

"It can confuse the decision-making process quite a bit, particularly because municipal ballots, just by their very nature, tend to be very long," said David Siegel, a professor of political science at Brock University. 

Those long ballots can cause some people to turn to voting short-cuts. 

"Name recognition seems to be very significant in that incumbents have a huge advantage in the electoral process," said Siegel.

"The other thing - there's some work that suggests that people who's names appear at the top of the ballot, on a longer ballot in particular ... are more likely to get votes than people farther down. And in Ontario we do things alphabetically so that creates a bias in favour of certain people."

Those who show up at the ballot box may also choose to mark their 'x' for higher profile races, such as mayor, but take a pass on other races, such as the school board election.

• School trustee elections lack fanfare of municipal council 

When voters don't check all of the boxes they can, it's what the city calls "undervoting." 

"It happens fairly regularly," said John Hannam, Thunder Bay's city clerk. 

"Often what we hear from voters is that they don't know all of the candidates, so they only vote amongst the names they're familiar with or aware of."

Hannam says the city is doing its best to encourage people to vote, but also to encourage all of the candidates to be visible and get their messages out to voters. 

The effort may be paying off. Hannam says advance poll voter turnout in Thunder Bay is up over the last election.