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If they genuinely don’t have a preference, is it a bad thing if they refrain from effectively voting at random?
For one person? No. For 1/5th of the voting population? It's a travesty.
Especially in the city council race...
These are photos of my ballot, I live in District 1. District 1 has NEVER had representation on the city council before.
This is why we voted to change the system of government, the city now has 4 districts, each district gets 3 councilmen.
Voters had a chance to rank their top 6 choices to elect 3 people per district and 20% of voters went "Nah!"
My city (Oakland) has ranked-choice voting for mayor and city council, and (as far as I’m aware) doesn’t have a similar issue with under-voting.
Was there another factor besides the number of candidates on the ballot (e.g., no candidate statements in voter guides, or an ad campaign against ranked voting)?
Could be a combination of first time with ranked choice and too many candidates. Somebody is going to earn a degree doing the analysis here.
It's almost certainly the number of candidates. On the other hand, top three out of a much smaller number doesn't present voters with a lot of choice.
If it’s really just a matter of too many candidates, could they increase the number of signatures needed to get on the ballot?
It was less the number of signatures and more that this is the very first election for a new system of government, it drew out a TON of people.
Previously, we had a mayor and 5 city councilmen. Each elected city wide in a typical first past the post election.
Now we have a mayor elected citywide in a ranked choice, choose 6 election, who hires a city manager to run the different bureaus.
Then the city is split into 4 districts, each electing 3 councilmen in a rank 6 ballot.
So the city council is going from 5 to 12 and each district is guaranteed representation where often not only was it not guaranteed, there WAS no representation.
All in all, between the mayor and the council seats, 119 people were running.