The voter turnout overall was 31.6 percent, but an analysis by Town Clerk Brian Howard and school committee Chairman Larry Azer shows that more residents without children in the town schools voted.

Azer said that he would like to think that more parents would vote when an issue critical to the schools is on the ballot.

“Some people are just disengaged, and that’s a nationwide problem,” he said.

In the annual election March 27, the town rejected a $4.16 million tax increase by a vote of 3,022 to 2,604, 53 percent to 47 percent.

The proposal, which called for $1 million for other town departments in addition to $3 million for the schools, would have added $341 to the average tax bill.

If it had passed, the school department would have been able to increase its budget for the first time in five years.

Defeat of the override led to cuts in school programs – including three dozen employees, most of them teachers. The Devine Early Learning Center was closed, school bus service has been nearly eliminated, and school sports and extracurricular programs have been cut in half.

School officials took some solace in a slight increase in parent turnout, which in the past has been about 17 percent.

Howard and Azer compared the voter check-in lists from the election against school enrollment information.

Howard said there are some flaws in the information used in the study. For example, parents who don’t live with their children weren’t included while other relatives living at the same address, such as voting-age siblings or grandparents, were included.

“It’s not perfect,” Howard said. “But it does give you a sense of voting patterns over the last couple of years. It is clear that while more parents did come out to vote, it was not significant enough to offset the difference in the last few elections.”

Parents of school-age children make up about a fifth of the town’s voters. Howard said that only 22 percent have cast a ballot in at least one of the past five town elections.

While it was nice to see more parents vote this year, Azer said “it just means next time we have to try harder”’ to get their support when an override question is on the ballot.

While the school budget has been increased by $500,000 to $29.67 million, it is about $3 million less than what school officials said was needed to maintain programs from the past school year, due to raises for school employees and other expense increases.

Generally, turnout for town elections is far lower than those for state and federal elections, Howard said. Elections with override questions have the highest turnouts, on average, of local elections.

“It’s a lot harder to engage people in local affairs,” he said.

Howard said that the unique demographics of Randolph may provide some explanation of the lower turnout among parents. Some parents are recent immigrants, who may be not be citizens or aren’t familiar with local government and elections.

More than 70 percent of the students in the school system are minority and 40 percent come from low-income households, both groups which nationally have lower voter turnouts, said Howard.

Howard said there was a small portion of voters who did vote in their first municipal election this year.

Nationally, turnout is also less among younger voters, he said. The surge in parent turnout did decrease the average age of voters in this year’s town election to 56, compared with 59 in past elections.

The group organized to campaign for the override, Support a Future for Randolph, had targeted parents over a broad-based pitch to the town’s voters.

Kathy Haire, who chaired the campaign, was disappointed that more parents didn’t participate in the election. She said some of the shortcomings of the campaign may have been a factor.

“Trying to reach parents was our goal, and we fell short of our goal” in terms of phone calls and mailings to parents, she said.

The override campaign spent about $4,000 on the effort, with most of the money going toward a mailing, she said.

“Obviously, if the turnout had been larger, the results would have been favorable, assuming that most parents would have supported the override,” Haire said.

Fred Hanson may be reached at fhanson@ledger.com.