Should Knoxville Rethink Its Election Calendar?

Aligning nonpartisan city races with county and state elections could boost turnout. And even if there's some partisan spillover, the tradeoff might be worth it.

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If you’re a Knoxville city resident, there’s no shortage of opportunities to cast a ballot for your elected representatives. But to make your voice fully heard, you have to show up to the ballot box more often than most.

Over any given two-year span, city voters can participate in at least five separate elections. In odd-numbered years, there are two nonpartisan city elections—a primary in August and a general election in November. In even-numbered years, when most races are partisan, the electoral calendar includes a county primary in the spring (March in presidential years, May in non-presidential years), a federal/state primary and county general in August, and a federal/state general election in November.

For the casually engaged voter, that’s a lot of trips to the ballot box. Such frequent elections elicit what political scientists call voter fatigue. That fatigue, as the evidence shows, has consequences: the more often people are asked to vote, the less often they do. And elections also cost taxpayers a lot of money. Each additional election requires printing ballots, staffing polling locations, and devoting resources to administering what often end up being low-turnout affairs.

Knoxville’s turnout history illustrates the problem. Nearly 35,000 residents cast ballots in the 1987 mayoral race between Victor Ashe and Randy Tyree, with Ashe winning nearly 19,000 votes. In 2019, turnout had slipped to just over 25,000, with Indya Kincannon winning the mayor’s office with around 13,000 votes. By 2023, participation fell again—just over 16,000 people voted in the mayoral contest, with Kincannon reelected on roughly 9,500 votes. Yet in November 2024—when two high-profile city charter amendments appeared on the ballot alongside state and federal contests—more than 70,000 city residents turned out. The contrast speaks for itself.

Which invites an obvious question: why not align Knoxville’s city races with county and state elections?

The Structure of City Elections

To answer that question seriously, it helps to know why Knoxville’s election calendar is structured this way. Unlike many levels of government, Knoxville’s city elections are nonpartisan—meaning candidates appear on the ballot without an “R” or “D” beside their name.

Nonpartisan elections first gained prominence in the early 20th century as part of a broader wave of progressive-era reforms intended to combat what reformers viewed as corrupt, patronage-driven city governments. Celebrated as a hallmark of good government, the shift to nonpartisan elections was rooted in the idea that local governance should be more about competence than ideology and insulated, as much as possible, from the tribalism of party politics. To that end, removing party labels encourages voters to evaluate candidates on their merits rather than on party affiliation. Similarly, the odd-year electoral cycle separates local races from the partisan atmosphere of state and national elections and generally draws voters who are more attuned to local issues.

The rationale still makes sense. Local government is, at its core, about service delivery—fixing sidewalks, managing traffic, maintaining parks. These issues rarely sort neatly along partisan lines. We saw this dynamic recently in our own community, when Republican County Commission Chair Gina Oster worked with Democratic City Council Member Andrew Roberto—and his wife, Sarah—on traffic safety upgrades along Schaeffer Road after the tragic loss of their daughter in a head-on crash. That’s local government at its best: rooted in pragmatism, not partisanship.

Of course, simply removing the “R” or “D” from the ballot can only accomplish so much. No serious observer believes Knoxville’s city elections are untouched by partisanship. To the contrary, candidates can and often do align with parties and court partisan endorsements. Many even share campaign staff and infrastructure.

Still, the absence of party labels on the ballot itself matters. It shapes how voters encounter their choices—and in turn, how they make them. But while removing party labels from the ballot conveys clear benefits—and should be maintained—the value of Knoxville’s odd-year election calendar is less clear. What the odd-year calendar does impact, with near-certainty, is how many people show up to vote.

When elections are held can determine how many people vote and who votes.

Odd-year city elections in Knoxville routinely draw only a small fraction of eligible voters—sometimes barely in the double digits. This year’s city election is no different and appears headed for historically low participation. That ought to trouble anyone who believes legitimacy rests, at least in part, on the breadth of voter participation. If only a thin slice of the public is choosing its leaders, the claim that such elections reflect the community’s will becomes ever harder to defend.

The dismal turnout in recent city elections is at least partly due to Knoxville’s election calendar. When elections are held off-cycle—that is, outside of November in even-numbered years—voter turnout is almost always much lower.

The MIT Election Lab has documented the effect nationally: when local elections are held on the same day as state or federal elections, turnout rises dramatically. When they are held off-cycle, turnout falls. So there’s a clear tradeoff: off-cycle elections draw fewer voters but those who do participate tend to be more informed, while on-cycle elections bring more voters to the polls but with less attention to local issues.

How one weighs that tradeoff is a legitimate debate, and reasonable people can disagree. What’s hard to dispute, though, is that aligning Knoxville’s city races with county and state elections would boost voter participation. Baltimore offers a striking example: its municipal turnout once hovered in the low teens. But after aligning city elections with presidential ballots, participation nearly quadrupled.

The solution, then, seems fairly simple. If increased civic participation is the goal—and it should be—Knoxville should keep elections nonpartisan, but hold them when more people are already voting.

None of this means abandoning the principle of nonpartisan local elections. In fact, that principle is worth defending. But the virtues of nonpartisan local government are not undermined by holding elections alongside county and state contests. If anything, they are strengthened by the legitimacy that comes with more voters participating. The question, then, isn’t really whether or not partisanship will creep into city politics—it always has—but whether we want decisions about our local future made by 15 percent of the electorate or by 50.

It’s hard to dispute that the timing of an election also shapes the composition of the electorate that actually turns out. Generally speaking, even-year elections attract a larger share of partisan voters—people who are more invested in national political issues. This is evident from the sizable number of citizens who routinely vote in state and federal contests but sit out local ones. Yet the mere presence of more partisan voters—who, after all, have the same right to participate as anyone else—does not necessarily make elections themselves more partisan. In fact, synchronizing city elections with state and federal elections could, somewhat counterintuitively, reduce the influence of political parties.

Political parties have limited time, money, and volunteer capacity. When city elections occur alongside partisan races, parties themselves are far more likely to channel their resources into their partisan nominees for county, state, and federal offices. By contrast, in odd-year city elections—when there are no partisan campaigns competing for attention—political parties have more time to promoting their preferred candidates in local races. With no partisan contests on the ballot, parties can—and often do—devote more energy into backing their preferred candidates for mayor or city council.

Put differently: odd-year elections give parties an open playing field, while even-year elections dilute their focus. From this perspective, synchronizing city elections with state and federal contests might actually weaken—not strengthen—the partisan pull on nonpartisan municipal races.

For a policy wonk like me, this makes for an interesting thought experiment. But there are serious hurdles to making a change like this happen. Moving city elections to even-numbered years would require amending the city charter—something that can only happen if City Council agrees to put the question on the ballot and voters approve it at the polls.

But the central question I pose here is not one about feasibility but merit: are the tradeoffs of odd-year city elections truly worth it?

In my view, the core value of nonpartisan elections lies in removing the “R” or “D” from the ballot. The odd-year scheduling is an accessory to that goal, but not the centerpiece. If the price of higher participation is having nonpartisan city elections in the same year as partisan ones, that seems like a trade worth making.

Knoxville’s election calendar isn’t immutable. It is a choice—and it might be time to choose differently.