71% of the more than 4,500 local elections Ballotpedia covered in April were uncontested

Welcome to the Friday, May 3, Brew.

Here’s what’s in store for you as you start your day:

1. 71% of the more than 4,500 local elections Ballotpedia covered in April were uncontested
2. 2024 statewide ballot measure certifications currently running ahead of 10-year average
3. #FridayTrivia: What percentage of state legislative seats are open this year?

71% of the more than 4,500 local elections Ballotpedia covered in April were uncontested

As part of Ballotpedia’s growing coverage of the nation’s local elections (with a goal of eventually covering all of them), we will be issuing monthly reports on the results, trends, and emerging issues we discover. Here’s a link to our March report.

Today, we’re looking at the elections we covered in April. Of the 4,596 elections in 21 states, 71% were uncontested.

That’s less than March, when 77% of the 6,995 covered were uncontested.

We define an uncontested election as one where the number of candidates running is less than or equal to the number of seats up for election. This analysis includes primary and general elections and does not account for write-in candidates.

In April, we covered the most elections in Wisconsin, where 72% of the 3,621 elections were uncontested. We also covered more than 100 elections in Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, and Utah. Of those four states, Pennsylvania had the highest uncontested election rate, at 90%, while Oklahoma had the lowest, at 14%.

April’s uncontested election rate was greater than the 58% average rate we identified between 2018 and 2023.

It also brings the year-to-date uncontested election rate to 74%, which is the second-highest at this point in the year since we began collecting data in 2018. The highest uncontested election rate was in 2020, at 76%. The lowest rate at this point was 45% in 2019.

For comparison, since 2018, each year has had more uncontested than contested elections except for 2021, when 50.4% of the elections we covered were contested.

Our analysis includes offices at all levels of government, excluding the presidency. Through April, 89% of the 1,473 local judge elections we’ve covered have been uncontested, the highest among any office type. Mayoral races have the lowest uncontested rate at 47% of the 152 covered so far.

Click on the link below to learn more about uncontested elections nationwide last month and in all previous months through 2024.

2024 statewide ballot measure certifications currently running ahead of 10-year average

To date, 94 statewide ballot measures have been certified for the ballot in 34 states, three more measures than the average (91) at this point in the year from 2012 to 2022. An average of 157 statewide measures were certified in even-numbered years during that 10-year period.

Here’s an update on the ballot measure activity during the past two weeks.

Election officials certified five ballot measures in Colorado, Maine, and Oklahoma:

Campaigns in California, Colorado, Idaho, Missouri, and South Dakota submitted signatures to election officials for the following nine measures:

Those measures are pending signature verification or other pre-certification actions. In Massachusetts, election officials verified enough signatures for seven indirect ballot initiatives to appear before the Legislature:

• Massachusetts Regulated Access to Psychedelic Substances Initiative (There are two versions of this measure.)

In Massachusetts, initiated state statutes are indirect. This means the legislature has the option to pass the initiative outright. Legislators have a certain number of days, depending on the state, to adopt the initiative into law. In Massachusetts, petitioners collect a second round of signatures to place the initiative on the ballot.

The most recent signature deadline for citizen-initiatives was May 1, in Idaho, where one campaign submitted signatures for an initiative to create a top-four ranked-choice voting system. The other campaign proposed an initiative to legalize medical marijuana.

The next signature deadline is May 5, in Missouri, where 36 initiative campaigns are underway.

The following chart shows the number of ballot measures certified each week of an even-numbered year.

#FridayTrivia: What percentage of state legislative seats are open this year?

We’ve been busy crunching the numbers to get a sense of the level of competition in this year’s state legislative, state executive, and congressional primaries. We’ve released annual reports on primary competitiveness trends since 2010. In the Wednesday Brew, we looked specifically at state legislative incumbents and open seats trends going back to 2010 — and how this year’s primaries compare.

An open seat means an incumbent is not running for re-election.

Between 2010 and 2022, an average of 19% of state legislative seats were open each year. This average is more than the percentage of open state legislative seats in 2024.

What percentage of state legislative seats are open this year?

1. 17%
2. 18.9%
3. 14.6%
4. 9.3%