Democracy For All Dedham seeks to engage voters

Election season is around the corner and Democracy For All Dedham will be participating in its first election season. The goal of DFAD is to not only engage voters to come to the polls and be involved in the process, but to also get residents who would like to be involved the knowledge and know how to run for office or join a committee.

We have roughly 18,500 registered voters in town. In the last 5 town elections we have had the following numbers of voters came out to vote and a rough percentage of the total vote.

2017 - 3817 21%

2018 - 5233 28%

2019 - 4390 24%

2020 - 6405 35%

2021 - 4173 23%

For the most part on a regular basis more than 70% of our town is not engaged in the voting process. I can’t speak for the town, but I personally find this to be a disturbing revelation.

The only time we eclipsed over 30% of the vote in the last five years was 2020, the year the rail trail question was in the ballot. This past year with a stacked, 8 candidate School Committee race we had over 2200 less voters. That is another thing I found disturbing. More residents turned out for the rail trail question in 2020 than the future of our students education in 2021.
So the question is simply why are people not engaged? Do residents feel they are not represented? Do they feel town government does or doesn’t need their input? Do they not have time to vote? Do they simply feel their vote will not make a difference? Is it something else?

I would like to know. If you are reading this and would be willing to share this info with me my personal email is dfury13@yahoo.com. I would like to know. I’d like to have folks reach out to see if I can help.
There could be a multitude of reasons people do not vote, but these folks pay property tax if they own a home or their rent is based on how their landlord is taxed so either directly or indirectly they pay for this town to operate and they should want a stake in how we do things and not simply be an open check book for the town with their tax payments.
I truly hope folks who are not regularly voting will reach out and be interested in being engaged. Voting is a civic duty and we should all take an interest in our town and want to be part of shaping what we do in the present and in the future.

You can learn more about Democracy For All Dedham by going to our Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/DFADedham/