The councillors’ races drew even fewer.
Alvin Tedjo is Mississauga’s mayor-elect after winning 74,479 votes in the Oct. 26 municipal election. The City reports that as 38.9 per cent of ballots cast, a decisive win in a 14-candidate field that included incumbent Carolyn Parrish (51,853) and former mayor Bonnie Crombie (43,191).
But measured against everyone who was eligible to vote, the picture changes. The City’s results file lists 563,676 registered voters. Tedjo’s 74,479 votes amount to 13.2% of them, or roughly one eligible voter in every seven and a half.
That is not an inflated number, and it is not unusual. Candidates’ results are normally reported as a share of ballots or votes cast, not of the whole electorate. But the gap between 38.9 per cent and 13.2 per cent is a measure of how many residents did not take part.
Two-thirds stayed home
In total, 191,166 ballots were cast, a turnout of 33.9%. That leaves 372,510 eligible residents, about 66%, who did not vote at all.
Of those who did vote, 189,954 cast a valid vote for one of the 14 mayoral candidates. The remaining 1,212 ballots had no valid vote for mayor. They were left blank, spoiled or declined.
Down the ballot, fewer still
The drop-off continues in the ward races. Across all 11 wards, councillor candidates received a combined 183,582 votes. That is 6,372 fewer than the mayoral race, even though every voter received a councillor ballot. Put another way, 7,584 of the people who turned out, about 4.0%, did not cast a valid vote for a councillor.
The 11 winning councillors received 114,045 votes between them, or 20.2% of the city’s eligible voters. The City has not published eligible-voter counts for each ward, so each councillor’s share of their own ward’s electorate cannot yet be calculated.
Some ward winners were chosen by small numbers of people. In Ward 2, Tom Ellard won a 14-candidate race with 4,434 votes, 30.4 per cent of the votes cast for councillor. In Ward 7, Lucas Alves won a 17-candidate race with 4,460 votes, 26.2 per cent. In each of those wards, about seven in ten people who voted for a councillor backed someone else.
| Measure | Votes / people | % of eligible voters |
| Eligible (registered) voters | 563,676 | 100.0% |
| Ballots cast (turnout) | 191,166 | 33.9% |
| Valid votes for mayor (all candidates) | 189,954 | 33.7% |
| Valid votes for councillor (all 11 wards) | 183,582 | 32.6% |
| Votes for the 11 winning councillors | 114,045 | 20.2% |
| Votes for the mayor-elect | 74,479 | 13.2% |
| Did not vote | 372,510 | 66.1% |
Source: City of Mississauga, 2026 unofficial results. Percentages calculated from the City’s figures.
A better year than the last one
Context matters. Turnout this year was well above the last general election. In 2022, just 21.84% of eligible voters cast a ballot (107,310 of 491,260), according to the City’s certified results. This year, 83,856 more people voted, an increase of 78%, while the voters’ list grew by about 15%. Advance voting also set a record: 44,049 votes, up 57 per cent from 28,052 in 2022.
So more Mississauga residents engaged this year than in 2022. Even so, most did not.
