Albuquerque voters came out in numbers not seen in a decade for Tuesday’s election.
A total of 97,419 voters, or 29.01 percent of registered voters, cast ballots in the election that saw Tim Keller and Dan Lewis head to a runoff and defeated the Healthy Workforce Ordinance in a razor-thin vote.
Four incumbent city councilors won reelection, while a fifth district will find out its next councilor in a runoff election on Nov. 14, the same day as the mayoral runoff.
Just under 97,000 people voted in the mayoral election this year. That was the second-highest vote total in a mayoral election, behind 2001, which saw 99,340 votes cast in the mayoral race. That year, 42 percent of the city’s voters turned out.
Still, the turnout this year outstripped the mayoral elections in 2013 and 2009, both races won by Richard Berry.
This echoed a trend of increased turnout in elections in 2017. Special elections for congress and state legislative races nationwide have seen large turnout, usually attributed to the election of Donald Trump and the backlash from Democrats who oppose his presidency.
In Albuquerque, Democrats received over 60 percent of the vote (between Keller, Brian Colón and Gus Pedrotty). Keller received 38,156 votes, more than Berry did in 2009, when Berry won with 36,869 votes, or 43.79 percent. At that time, candidates only needed to get 40 percent of votes to avoid a runoff.
