Planning Commission Chairman Kevin Beard won five of the seven on-campus precincts in Tuesday’s election.

The remaining two precincts went to Planning Commissioner Liz Harrow.

Yet neither of them won seats on the East Lansing City Council on Tuesday.

With 8,718 voters registered at the campus locations, the turnout at those seven polls was roughly 1.4 percent.

Downtown Development Authority Chairman Vic Loomis, with 27.4 percent of the vote, and two-term Councilmember Bill Sharp, with 26.13 percent of the vote, defeated Beard (25.71 percent) and Harrow (20.76 percent).

Beard, only 31 votes shy of winning a seat on the council, collected votes on the majority of the 126 ballots marked in the campus precincts during the 13 hours they were open.

“As far as campus goes, when I think about how much effort I put into educating the student population, these numbers are frustrating,” Beard said. “It’s very hard to convince a council candidate to reach out to student voters when they aren’t going to respond.

“Whatever barriers there still may be to getting students to turn out to vote on Election Day need to be identified and removed.”

Bill Ballenger, editor and publisher of Inside Michigan Politics, said he recognizes voter turnout in all the area elections was miserable, including the lowest turnout in a Lansing election in 50 years, but the MSU student turnout may have hit an all-time low, he said.

“A 2 percent turnout has to be the most pathetic turnout I have ever heard of,” he said. “With this new law that makes students register where they get their licenses, there is a lot of controversy. A lot of students are not happy, but my God, if that many people are registered on campus, there doesn’t seem to be much interest.”

Beard and Ballenger’s concerns were shared by the rest of the candidates.

Loomis said he noticed a problem with the voting statistics as they were coming in on election night.

“One issue that hit my radar screen right away is (we need) to focus on improving relations between the city and the university,” he said. “I really thought the student vote total would be a lot higher than it actually turned out being.

“A couple of us spent some time there and knocked on a lot of dorm room doors. I did some things to drive up interest, and the best I can tell is that each campus precinct looks like, on average, it received about 20 voters.”

Harrow said she believes the low turnout is a direct result of students feeling unattached to the city and its politics.

“Students don’t feel that connected to the city or even know the geography of the city,” she said. “We have to find a way to connect the issues affecting us with larger national issues. Students don’t get involved, because they think they’re just here for four years.”

The turnout for the rest of the city’s polls was slightly higher.

East Lansing City Clerk Sharon Reid said the city’s 18 collective polls had 4,408 ballots submitted, a 14.33 percent voter turnout, up from 9.33 percent in the primary.

“This is about what we expected,” Reid said. “The numbers are slightly higher than 2000’s 12 percent turnout, but they usually are with a millage on the ballot.”

But looking solely at the percentages might not tell the whole story, East Lansing Mayor Mark Meadows said.

While the percentage of voter turnout has gone up over the past three years, the total number of votes cast has dropped, Meadows said.

“We’ve managed to purge our records a bit of those no longer living in the city,” he said. “But if I look back at the vote totals in recent elections, they’ve gone down.”

When Meadows ran in 1995, he won with 4,200 votes, but in 1999 he won with 2,600 votes, he said.

Sharp called the recent voter apathy “very sad,” especially when referring to the voters on campus.

“I can’t believe that more people didn’t vote,” he said. “Unless there’s a burning issue that really divides the city, I don’t think the students will ever get out and vote. If they are going to vote, they’re going to vote at home.

“It’s a futile cause. I wish I could just snap my fingers and bring more voters out, but I’ve been here since the 1940s, and I haven’t seen it yet.”

Sara Luneburg can be reached at lunebur1@msu.edu.