The 2024 Brazilian municipal elections recorded historically high abstention rates, suggesting a potential crisis of political representation at the local level. This article investigates the determinants of voters’ autonomous willingness to vote — that is, their motivation to participate in elections regardless of the legal obligation. The central hypothesis is that, while ideology plays a relevant role in national elections, it has limited mobilizing power in local contexts. Based on survey data collected by IPEC (2024), we construct a dependent variable by combining two items: the respondent’s subjective willingness to vote and their stated intention to do so if voting were not mandatory. A logistic regression model is estimated with independent variables including ideological self-placement, perceived importance of the election, education, income, age, gender, religion, and municipal context (capital vs. interior). Results show that only 30.9% of respondents exhibit a high autonomous willingness to vote, and that perceived electoral importance is the strongest predictor of voluntary participation. Ideological orientation, in contrast, shows limited and statistically fragile effects, with lower engagement among those who cannot or do not wish to declare a position. The study concludes that voluntary electoral participation is more strongly associated with the political meaning attributed to the election than with structural or identity-based factors. Electoral competitiveness thus emerges as a critical variable for understanding citizen engagement in local voting.