Does Anyone Actually Care That Carroll Barely Voted?

By Ronald Sampson

A Facebook exchange has been circulating in Scottsdale political circles this week. Crystal Carroll, the Old Town business owner running for City Council, was challenged publicly over having voted only once in the past decade. She responded with candor: four kids, multiple businesses, a cancer hospitalization in 2024. The critics pounced. But here is the question worth asking: does any of this actually matter to voters anymore?

It used to. A thin voting record was once considered a genuine disqualifier. So was marijuana use. So was a DUI from thirty years ago. Political culture has shifted considerably on all of those fronts.

The Context That Makes Her Case Somewhat Sympathetic

Carroll’s explanations are not nothing. A serious illness in 2024 is a legitimate reason to miss an election. Running multiple businesses while raising four children is a legitimate reason to be distracted. These are the kinds of circumstances that resonate with ordinary people who are not political hobbyists and who do not organize their lives around election calendars.

By her own account, she began educating herself politically around 2020. That is five or six years of growing civic awareness before she decided to run. It is not a lifetime of engagement, but it is not nothing either.

Where the Sympathy Has Limits

The more durable concern is not the voting record itself. It is what the voting record represents: a candidate who, by her own admission, was largely checked out of civic life until recently. Scottsdale’s policy debates: water, development, overdevelopment, the Axon campus question, the preserve: reward institutional familiarity. Those are not issues someone picks up quickly.

Carroll filed her candidacy statement in February. Her first prominent public appearance was at Mayor Borowsky’s January summit. That is a compressed timeline for a council seat with real consequences.

The Marijuana Test

The useful analogy here may be the one voters have quietly been applying for years: past marijuana use, once a campaign-ender, is now largely irrelevant. Voters have collectively decided that youthful or even sustained personal choices do not automatically disqualify someone from public service.

Minimal voting history may be trending in the same direction. What voters are increasingly focused on is whether a candidate understands the job and has coherent positions on the issues that matter.

The Real Question

Carroll may clear that bar. She may not. But the Facebook pile-on over her voting record is probably not the decisive test most of her critics believe it to be. Scottsdale voters in 2026 are going to make their call based on water policy, development pressure, and fiscal priorities: not on whether someone skipped a midterm in 2016.