I wrote last week about the Raleigh mayoral race, and why students should take the time to do research and vote for their favored candidate. While the mayor’s seat is obviously important, they actually have less power than one might think. They have only one vote on the eight-seat council and can neither veto legislation nor cast a tie-breaking vote.

Thus, even if you are passionate about a certain mayoral candidate and their agenda, then you still have more work to do researching the city council candidates you want to vote for. Without four other friendly votes on the council, the mayor is unable to do much of anything.

The upside of doing this work is that your vote for council seats has more weight than in the mayor race. From the 2017 election returns, whereas almost 53,000 people voted for mayor, the two at-large seats had under 48,000 voters (with each voter having 2 ballots). In District D (where NC State’s main campus is located), slightly fewer than 8,500 votes were cast, which is less than the number of students in the College of Engineering.

There are three types of seats on the council. The mayor is elected in a single race by all the qualified voters in the city. Two at-large seats are decided by a single election in which everyone casts two ballots, and the top two vote-getters win. The other five seats are each elected by voters in one of five districts.

This sounds complicated, but the easiest way to figure out who you can and should vote for is to check your voter registration and download a sample ballot, which looks exactly like the ballot you will receive on Election Day, showing you all the races you can vote on.

Elections for the council are all nonpartisan, so it’s especially important to do some research ahead of time, since you can’t rely on voting along a party line (not that you should in any election). This also means that multiple candidates from the same party can run against each other and say similar things, meaning other factors like their experience and what issues they care most about can be just as important as their published platform.

When framed this way, voting sounds a lot more challenging than we might think it to be, and for those who don’t want to put forth the effort to do research, it may not be worthwhile to vote. However, if there were ever an election to put effort into, it’s a municipal election. Your vote counts a lot in these elections, and the outcome is far more likely to have an impact on your daily life than a policy that manages to drag itself through the federal government.

City elections are rarely scandalous and are a substantial ask in terms of doing research. But it’s precisely because of this that the city has so much power in our lives, because the people in power are often able to work together and pass their desired policies. It’s in your best interest as a most-of-the-year resident of Raleigh to participate.