The race to replace Salt Lake Mayor Rocky Anderson features four strong candidates elbowing each other in today's primary for two spots in the November general election, and the contest is so close that every vote just might matter.

It's exactly the type of local election that economists and political scientists believe should spur high voter turnout. Instead, pollster Dan Jones estimates that fewer than one-third of Salt Lake City's registered voters will bother to show up.

And that makes the Salt Lake City mayoral primary — like other mayoral and city council primaries around the state — a study in voter apathy.

Utah clearly is not immune to a phenomenon that has been spreading across America for four decades. The 2004 presidential election managed to create the largest national turnout since 1968, according to the Committee for the Study of the American Electorate. Still, more than 78 million Americans who were eligible to vote stayed home. President Bush received 50.8 percent of the votes cast, but that represented just 30.8 percent of all eligible voters.

Voter apathy in the Salt Lake race was evident last week when Dan Jones & Associates conducted its poll of the race for the Deseret Morning News and KSL-TV. The company's callers needed a random sample of 500 registered voters who said they were likely to vote today. Before they completed the 500th survey, they had called 861 people who said they weren't likely to vote.

"That's high," Jones said, though he also found evidence that a race seemingly headed for an even more dismal turnout now appears likely to draw 29 percent to 30 percent of registered voters because of increased advertising and media coverage.

"I think the last two weeks have helped turn things around," Jones said.

For experts, this race has everything it should need to attract even more voters. Experts "wince," Brigham Young University political scientist Kelly Patterson said, at estimates that 28,000 of Salt Lake City's 94,578 registered voters will make a decision for a city of 180,000 people.

"It seems to me in this mayoral race, there's no excuse (not to vote)," said Kirk Jowers, director of the Hinckley Institute of Politics at the University of Utah. "Two of the four candidates will advance to the general election, and fewer than 100 votes could make the difference."

Voter apathy in a close local election can seem like irrational behavior under rational choice theory and game theory. But in recent years, fewer people vote in local elections than in national presidential elections, where economists believe a single vote is next to meaningless.

But drawing people to the polls requires more than a good horse race.