Eye On Illinois: How was voter turnout in your local elections?

Two hundred and forty-three votes.

That was the difference in my hometown’s mayoral vote earlier this month. The county clerk should sign the certificate of election results Monday afternoon, an attestation that in a town of about 20,500 residents, only 5,105 cast ballots to decide who will lead the village over four years.

There were three trustee positions and five candidates. The difference between third and fourth place was 42 votes. For the K-8 school board, with four seats open and seven candidates, the fifth-place finisher fell shy by 318. The high school board, which incorporates a much larger area, had five candidates for four seats. The worst finisher, who robustly used social media and papered blocks with yard signs, missed out by 122 ballots.

I’ll spare you the details of the precinct-by-precinct breakdown, as well as the per-candidate numbers on election day votes versus early voting, vote by mail and late-arriving mail/provincial ballots, but it’s fantastic to have that information at the ready.

Not every county uses the same web platform. Lake and McHenry counties are among those using Clarity Elections from SOE Software. DeKalb posts a 34-page PDF that looks exactly like the sheets reporters of yore waited anxiously for clerk employees to hang on windows in courthouse basements. Kane County has fewer details for unofficial results, but gives the registered voter total and turnout percentage for every single district – a ton of work for a consolidated election.

But regardless of website format, all election officials have this level of information, and any political operative worth their salt knows how to access and utilize the data. The average citizen can do so as well, if sufficiently motivated, and while it’s wise to be wary of drawing too many conclusions from small samples, becoming an educated voter is about more than just knowing issues and candidates but also understanding the registration and election process.

Perhaps races in your community weren’t decided by fewer people than attend high school football games. Maybe a margin of 122 makes you think “my one vote still wouldn’t have mattered.” But trust these officials understand very well how few citizens actually participate. They’ve conducted public meetings without a single interested spectator or speaker. They know the likely low turnout percentages.

As such, they realize they’re directly accountable to the people who do show up, initiate communication and reliably vote. They know those few active citizens can mobilize others to action. Think not in terms of threat or intimidation, but influence and electoral consequence.

Voters often feel isolated from Washington, D.C., and Springfield. Math and distance make it inevitable. Being cut off from local officials is a choice, one we need not make.

• Scott T. Holland writes about state government issues for Shaw Local News Network. He can be reached at sholland@shawmedia.com.