Thousands of West Virginia voters lack choices on their ballots. Here are the consequences of uncontested elections

On May 14, West Virginia voters will go to the polls for the state’s primary election. Nearly 1,800 people are running for elected office here, and while positions like U.S. Senator and West Virginia Governor have been sucking up a lot of the air over the past few months, there are a lot of lower-profile races that are just as important. Those include races for the state’s 30 judicial circuits and county positions like prosecuting attorney and board of education members.

But a shocking number of these races aren’t really races at all. For many elected offices, West Virginia votes will simply have no choices.

Maybe we already knew this. But over the last few months it’s become even more clear, as I once again spent days going through ballots and websites and Facebook pages to create Mountain State Spotlight’s 2024 primary election voter guide .

Two years ago, I lobbied hard to create the first iteration of this comprehensive guide to answer one simple question for West Virginian voters: Who’s on my ballot? While this information is publicly available, it’s not always user-friendly. Our gamble in 2022 was that there were a lot of West Virginians who wanted a preview of who was running for office, as well as a few basic ways to research them like campaign websites and social media pages.

We were right, and about 20% of the people who cast a ballot in that election consulted one or more pages of that voter guide.

So, we did it again this year. I went through every statewide, district, county and many municipal elections and tried to track down information about the candidates. We wanted voters to know their choices, to help them make informed decisions.

But West Virginians have few options in so many of these races.

Many state and county races will be decided in the primaries (if there’s a decision to be made at all)

There are 117 statehouse races on the ballot this year; in 50 of them, there are only candidates from one political party running. In almost all these cases, it’s only Republicans running for the seat. This means that only registered Republicans (and independent voters who ask for a Republican ballot) will get to make any kind of choice about who will ultimately represent them in the state House or Senate.

In many of these statehouse races, even people voting a Republican ballot don’t have much of a choice. In 32 of the races for legislative seats, there’s only one candidate running, period. That means for 32 of your elected representatives, the only hurdles to office are the bureaucratic tasks of paying a small filing fee ($100 for the House of Delegates and $200 for the State Senate) and filling out the required paperwork.

In counties, there are even fewer options. Take county prosecuting attorneys: Every county has one, and the seat is on the ballot in every county but Lincoln. But in 43 of those 54 prosecutor races —79%! — there is only one person running for the job.

This isn’t a new problem, and it’s not unique to West Virginia.

During the 2016 election, 75% of West Virginia’s prosecuting attorney elections were uncontested, according to research by Carissa Byrne Hessick, a law professor at the University of North Carolina and the director of the Prosecutors and Politics Project . Across the country, she said the biggest factor in determining whether there’s more than one candidate running for the seat is population.

It makes sense: In order to run for prosecuting attorney, you have to be a lawyer. And not all lawyers even want to practice criminal law, like prosecutors do. So Hessick says in counties with smaller populations, the pool is pretty small.

“These small jurisdictions tend to have fewer lawyers, which is going to affect the number of people who are eligible to run for this office,” she said.

This ends up making people less motivated to make the effort to vote, according to West Virginia University political science professor Bill Franko.

“Less competition is going to lead to lower levels of voter turnout,” he said. “People are going to think their vote matters less, like ‘what’s the point if I turn out or not, this person is going to end up winning.’”

In many ways, this is a self-perpetuating cycle. Specifically for prosecuting attorney races, Hessick has found that media outlets don’t cover uncontested elections as often as they do contested ones, so people tend to be less aware of the position’s responsibilities and less likely to challenge an incumbent for the job.

(These media outlets, by the way, totally include Mountain State Spotlight. We’ve had tough conversations about election stories, including focusing resources on contested races. But we have broader coverage planned for the months leading up to the general election in November, including a push to try to change the way we cover elections with our Citizen’s Agenda approach .)

Fewer choices means less competition and lower turnout

This lack of choices affects voter turnout more broadly, too. When candidates aren’t forced to compete for votes, they do less campaigning and voter outreach — activities that tend to give people more information about candidates and make them feel more comfortable voting. It also means that increasingly, West Virginia’s elected officials haven’t had to make the case for their election, or had to tell voters where they stand on important issues in the state.

Ultimately, this lack of competition has consequences for West Virginians.

Some research has shown that lawmakers who win their seats with no opposition were less likely to introduce bills and show up to vote than those who had to compete. And Franko’s research , which largely focuses on how economic inequality plays out in voting, has found that when voter turnout is down, the people who end up voting and influencing policies aren’t always representative of the population.

“So what happens if you have fewer people from lower means backgrounds turning out in elections?” he asked. “What my work has found is that this ends up leading to less representation for those people when it comes to policy outcomes.” The overall result, in many cases, is that the laws that end up being passed aren’t beneficial for poorer West Virginians.

As for prosecutors, Hessick says the result of this lack of competition isn’t quite as easy to see. But that in itself is part of the problem.

Prosecutors generally have broad authority to decide what cases they want to prosecute, what types of crimes to charge people with, what kind of plea deals to offer. And unlike a lawmaker’s voting record, it’s much more difficult for a voter to get insight into how their elected prosecuting attorney is approaching law enforcement.

“They have these incredibly consequential decisions that they have to make and we don’t even know what those decisions are,” Hessick said. “Even if you wanted to find out what decisions are being made, it’s incredibly hard to get your hands on this information.”

So, what’s the solution to getting more candidates for these positions, which could then increase campaigning, leading to more information and higher voter turnout?

As far as prosecutors go, Hessick says one solution is creating larger prosecutorial districts, which could include grouping smaller counties together. That would create a larger potential pool of candidates vying for the position.

Franko said the issues are hard to disentangle, but another solution is to make both voting and running for office easier — starting with asking people to do it. There are a lot of barriers to even casting a ballot, he said, and those are only magnified when you look at what’s needed to run for office.

“Are people asking you to vote? Is someone trying to get you to turn out to vote? Do you have the resources to try to understand the process and navigate? Apply that to running for office,” he said. “You need resources. You need to be able to navigate the process. Are people asking you to run for office? Same thing, but even harder.”

He noted that some countries have increased voter turnout by having fewer elections, like making sure that city and state elections appear on the same ballot as national races. West Virginia officials could also increase the number of voters who end up weighing in on nonpartisan races — for critical positions like judgeships and board of education members — by moving that election to the November ballot, where the general election turnout is typically nearly double the primary.

None of these potential solutions will change West Virginia’s candidate pool overnight. But every West Virginia voter’s ballot does include a couple of races with choices.

There are three candidates vying for a single seat on the West Virginia Intermediate Court of Appeals, and this is voters’ first chance to pick a judge for this newly-formed court.

And, in many counties, Board of Education races are contested. These are the people who will decide what and how our kids learn — and they are nonpartisan contests that will be decided on Tuesday.

Polls are open on May 14 from 6:30 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. And our voter guide is right here to help.

Thousands of West Virginia voters lack choices on their ballots. Here are the consequences of uncontested elections appeared first on Mountain State Spotlight , West Virginia's civic newsroom.