By Jeremy Lott

Data center developers are having a bad year at ballot boxes across America.

On Nov. 3, many cities and counties held votes on more restrictive rules for data centers. Six communities had already voted to pass similar ordinances earlier in the year.

Taken together, 38 local measures restricting data center development have now carried, and six measures are leading, for a total of at least 44 new roadblocks that developers will have to either work around or avoid by siting their data centers elsewhere.

Only one community has voted for what Redbud Consulting’s Data Centers on the Ballot dashboard calls the allow side, with the camps broken down into “restrict” and “allow.”

Residents of the city of Harwood, North Dakota, voted overwhelmingly against a charter amendment that would have required the city to commission an independent, developer-funded review as well as hold a public hearing and adopt written findings before approving large industrial projects on a data-center scale in terms of power and water usage.

The final no vote was 75.6 percent.

The national picture is the mirror-flipped image of the Harwood vote.

As of 8:35 pm ET on Nov. 4, 256,120 votes had been counted across the country. Approximately 77 percent of those votes had favored the restrict side.

In a few communities, the vote was close. For instance, 52.6 percent of Sprigg Township, Ohio, residents favored the more restrictive zoning law while they were also casting midterm election votes.

Morgan County, Illinois, registered the largest restrict vote in this election cycle, with 88.3 percent of voters voting for more regulations on the construction and operation of data centers.

Leading into this election cycle, in an early September vote, residents of Nottingham, New Hampshire, mustered a vote of 90.3 percent in favor of a temporary local moratorium on all data center development.

These local votes were consistent with the polling on data centers this year, which showed a new and potentially growing majority of Americans against building more data centers.

To take one metric, the Pew Research Center found that the percentage of Americans who thought data centers were “mostly bad” for the environment climbed from 39 percent in January to 54 percent in August.

About 60 percent of Americans also indicated that they do not want a data center opening up anywhere close to their neighborhoods.

Skepticism of data centers has risen in tandem with the AI large language models and other AI applications that they power. Americans’ usage of AI has increased and, lately, so has skepticism about an AI-powered future.

Three years ago, about 40 percent of Americans thought that AI did more harm than good. That negative association fell to 31 percent in 2024 and 2025 but rose back to 39 percent this year, according to the Bentley University-Gallup Business in Society Survey.

An increasing American majority had come to think of AI in neutral terms, doing roughly equal amounts of harm and good. Yet that benign view has taken a beating, falling from 57 percent in 2025 to 52 percent in May of this year when the survey was conducted, with more slippage likely occurring after. The share of people who think of AI as a net benefit to society has also fallen, from a high of 13 percent in 2024 to 9 percent in the most recent survey.

What this means is that even though a majority of people were not necessarily down on AI until very recently, there are now an order of magnitude more skeptics than boosters, and that intensity is being reflected in local referendums.