Milford Voter Turnout Continues to Drop

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Voter turnout for Milford municipal elections – elections in which the city votes for its next mayor, among other offices – has been on a steady decline since 2009, when Mayor James L. Richetelli Jr. was elected to his final two-year term.

Tuesday’s election – which saw Mayor Ben Blake, a Democrat, winning a second term – had a voter turnout of 35 percent, according to election results posted on the Connecticut Secretary of the State’s website.

The turnout is 8 percentage points less than the 43 percent voter turnout in the 2009 election where Richetelli coasted to a fifth term, receiving more than double the votes of his closest competitor, Democrat Genevieve P. Salvatore.

And it is 5 percentage points short of the 40 percent voter turnout in the 2011 election where Blake also won comfortably, beating Republican challenger Bernard Joy by nearly 2,000 votes.

Blake once again had an easy ride to victory this year, with official results giving the incumbent 61 percent of the vote.

William “Skip” Ziebell has been moderating elections in Milford for the past 12 years. On Tuesday, he was the man in charge at the Foran High School polling place, which serves about 7,000 registered voters in the Fourth District.

At about 10:30 a.m., a check of the ballot machine revealed only 650 people, or about 9 percent of registered voters in the district, had cast their ballot.

“I thought it would be higher,” Ziebell said. “That’s not as high as it normally would be.”

Ziebell expected traffic to pick up once people got out of work, but at the same time acknowledged that voter turnout is always substantially less in off years when there is no presidential election. The turnout in Milford in the 2012 presidential election, by the way, was nearly 76 percent.

Still, the moderator was confident clear skies and decent weather might bring a good amount of people to the polls.

Foran would finish with a voter turnout of 32 percent.