What was the lowest known voter participation rate?

Question

So, comments in this question mentioning extremes such as "nobody voted in election at all", led me to wonder:

What was the election where the LEAST percentage of eligible voters participated?

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The choices are limited to:

• "populace-wide" elections. E.g. at least 50% of population of a locale are eligible to vote.

• Elections within last 300 years.

• Mostly, I'm interested in national level elections in countries that can at least on some level be considered established "democracies" - e.g. those that have a history of, at least 20 years of popular elections prior.

• Excluded are cases where there are legitimate reasons for low turnout (e.g., the people are avoiding voting because there's a war/insurrection/government thugs scaring them off - such as post-US-invasion Iraq or Mugabe's Zimbabwe).

• Similarly excluded are special situations, e.g when people are prevented from voting by natural disasters etc...

In other words, I'm interested in the elections where the main/only reason one can assume for the low turnout is voter apathy/bad set of choices to vote for/general-low-election-participation culture.

Answer 1

This article running in the Dallas Observer states that the Dallas City Council run-off election had a participation rate of 4.21 percent of registered voters. That link took me a grand total of a minute to find, so I'm sure there are less.

As a former voter registrar, I can say that in general, people forget primaries and local races. City Councils and even statewide races are probably more important to most citizens' lives (trash? roads? schools? welfare? abortion? drugs? vs. what does the federal government do again? oh yeah - make treaties with other countries and fund cow fart studies) but they are almost always neglected.

My native Virginia, in particular, actually moved its guberantorial elections to non-presidential years back at the height of the Carter Glass & Byrd machines specifically to take advantage of this lower voter turnout. Worked like a charm.

Answer 2

The Swiss Federal Elections are well known for their very low voter turnouts. The turnout has been less than 50% since 1979:

• 2011: 49.10%
• 2007: 48.28%
• 2003: 45.22%
• 1999: 43.22%
• 1995: 42.25%
• 1991: 46.04%
• 1987: 47.48%
• 1983: 48.91%
• 1879: 48.06%

_{Source: Voter turnout data for Switzerland, International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance.}

A major contributing factor to the low referendums is Switzerland's unique political system; a semi-direct democracy. The Swiss hold referendums quite often (8 in 2013 so far), and voters have the chance to vote directly on the issues they care about. That said, the turnout for the referendums is also typically under 50%.