In the 2024 Oro Valley Council election, the vast majority of voters made a deliberate choice: Instead of voting for the allowed three candidates, 70% chose to vote for only two. The two candidates they overwhelmingly supported were Mary Murphy and Elizabeth Robb, who together received 4,800 more votes than incumbents Tim Bohen and Mo Greene. This gave them a significant 30% voting advantage in a four-person race. It’s likely that some voters paired Greene with Murphy or Bohen with Robb in their selections, but most decided not to cast their third vote.
Demonstrating a desire for new leadership
The clear message from voters in 2024 was: "We want fresh thinking on the council." Although incumbent Mo Greene was re-elected, it seems to be more due to the availability of an additional seat and a lack of a strong newcomer opponent rather than strong voter support. Greene received nearly 2,000 fewer votes than either of the two newcomers, suggesting that his presence on the council is more a result of circumstance than a strong voter mandate.
Greene narrowly defeated Bohen by 556 votes, with 542 of those votes coming from the three precincts around the town’s municipal golf courses. Bohen, known for his critical stance on the financial transparency of the town's golf operations, evidently lost support in these areas. However, his position didn’t gain him additional votes elsewhere in the community, indicating that most voters are indifferent to the golf course issue. This outcome highlights a key lesson from this election.
A shift in voter sentiment from the 2022 Election
The 2024 Council election results are a stark contrast to those of 2022, when voters clearly supported the continuation of the current council's direction by re-electing the three incumbents—Barrett, Nicolson, and Jones Ivey—with a 4,700-vote plurality, an 18% advantage in a six-person race. The number of ballots with less than three council votes in the 2024 election was notably higher, with 70% of voters opting not to use their third vote, compared to just 15% under-voting in 2022.
The new members will be seated on council in early November.
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Editor Note: An “undervote” occurs in an election when a voter selects fewer candidates than the number allowed for a particular race. For example, if voters are permitted to choose up to three candidates but only select one or two, those unselected slots are considered undervotes. The undervote is calculated by subtracting the total number of votes cast for all open positions from the total number of votes that could have been submitted. In our analysis, we divided that number by the number of ballots cast to determine the percent of ballots that contained less than three votes.
Editor Note: An “undervote” occurs in an election when a voter selects fewer candidates than the number allowed for a particular race. For example, if voters are permitted to choose up to three candidates but only select one or two, those unselected slots are considered undervotes. The undervote is calculated by subtracting the total number of votes cast for all open positions from the total number of votes that could have been submitted. In our analysis, we divided that number by the number of ballots cast to determine the percent of ballots that contained less than three votes.
