To the editor,
Re: City’s voter turnout was ‘reprehensible,’ Letters, Oct. 26.
I totally agree with all your previous readers who wrote in and expressed dismay in the 24-per cent turnout of voters for the election. That is sad and deplorable. So that means that 75 per cent of Nanaimoites did not vote and I guess then don’t care about how the city is run by the mayor and the councillors.
I agree that there were way too many candidates and it was a huge effort reading all of their platforms but it was important to know what they stood for and then voting for who would do the best job for us all and for Nanaimo. I sadly feel that Mayor Leonard Krog has not done much for this city unless I just haven’t noticed all the good that he and his councillors have done over the last term. I thought that a change would have been good.
So I guess if you didn’t vote in the municipal election then you don’t have the right to complain about all the homelessness, education, taxes, road repairs, infrastructure or anything else. So I guess one good thing that comes out of all this, is that we will hear a lot less complaining over the next four years, right? Probably not. Then why didn’t you get out and vote, people?
Kathy O’Donoghue, Nanaimo
READ ALSO: Krog re-elected as Nanaimo mayor, Manly top vote-getter among council candidates
To the editor,
Re: City’s voter turnout was ‘reprehensible,’ Letters, Oct. 26.
I certainly couldn’t bring myself to vote for either the mayor or any of the incumbent councillors. Their over-optimistic ideas of how Nanaimo alone can have even a remote effect on world pollution and weather patterns is more than enough to ensure my vote would go elsewhere. Add to that their complete obliviousness to reality in the matter of bike lanes and traffic calming and we’re left with the doubtful hope that three new councillors will be able to significantly change anything.
Unfortunately, with so many candidates standing for election it was at least difficult, and closer to impossible, to figure out just who they were and what they represented. The views and opinions stated by most of them seemed to bear an unhealthy similarity to those of the councillors that we were trying to unload. And not one of them stood out as offering real change.
Although Nanaimo is a comparatively small city, I believe that if we adopted the ward system used by larger municipalities, voters would have a far better chance of identifying the real views, ambitions and objectives of candidates. For instance if the city was split into only four wards, voters would only have to investigate 25 per cent of the candidates that the present system demands. We could all be far more knowledgeable about where our votes would go if we only had four to six candidates to consider. It is my belief that this would favourably affect voter turnout – I doubt anything else will.
Garry Bradford, Nanaimo
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