A light post. Fab Consigli won’t vote for Giorgio Mammoliti because of a light post.

Consigli said he knows nothing of Mammoliti’s ethics scandals, bewildering remarks, eternally evolving views on Mayor Rob Ford. He knows he called him once, didn’t get a call back.

“He hasn’t done anything,” Consigli, 45, said outside his house. “You know what, we asked the simplest thing, to put a light post over there, right where the laneway is. That was three years ago. Still haven’t heard nothing. So you know what? Doesn’t have my vote.”

Mammoliti, council’s ever-more-offensive clown prince, is in his 19th year as a local representative after five years as an MPP. His six-election run of success is Toronto’s most confounding unsolved municipal mystery, a whodunit that turns astute city hall observers into defeated detectives spluttering the same question over and over.

Who votes for this guy?

Dozens of interviews with residents of Ward 7 (York West), in May and August, suggest the answer may not be so complicated. Who votes for Giorgio Mammoliti? People not much different from the people who don’t vote for him.

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Mammoliti voters are not endorsing his antics. By and large, they are not aware of his antics. Like Consigli, they judge their area councillor on his work in the area.

They can be mocked as ignorant — as “low-information voters,” to use the polite parlance. They can also remind us just where city hall shenanigans, even serious integrity breaches, rank on residents’ lists of concerns.

“My husband play cards in the community centre. Mammoliti is there. He talk with him, Mammoliti, all the time. When the snow come here, sometime nobody come. My husband tell Mammoliti, somebody come,” said Anna Grieco, a senior from Italy who moved to the area in 1972. “He a good guy. Not perfect, but 99 per cent.”

“He’s helping to keep the area safe — burglary and stuff like that. He’s very involved,” said Therese, an 81-year-old woman who arrived in 1958 and declined to give her last name.

“He approaches you nice. He’s a very, very good man. I admire him. He’s concerned about the people in this area,” said Joyclyn McSween, 75, a retiree from Trinidad and Tobago who worked with young offenders. She pointed in the direction of Weston and Sheppard, an intersection Mammoliti had renovated and beautified. “Look what he did down there. Make that place look nice — all the baskets with flowers.”

Toronto municipal incumbents win more than 80 per cent of the time. They are so hard to beat not just because they get their names in the papers: they also have goodies to dispense. Nick Di Nizio, Mammoliti’s leading opponent in the last election and in this one, alleges the councillor timed local improvements to coincide with the 2010 campaign.

The timing was, at very least, auspicious. During a 10-day stretch two months before the October vote, Mammoliti and city officials held four separate ribbon-cutting ceremonies: one to celebrate upgrades to an arena, three to celebrate upgrades to playgrounds.

“Starting in August, we got so many things done in our ward you wouldn’t believe it,” Di Nizio said. “We got three parks refurbished. Grand openings in every park. Balloons, clowns and all that in every park. A street light was put in place — residents had been complaining for 20 years. All of a sudden, it just” — he snapped his fingers — “showed up.”

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More than 60 per cent of Mammoliti’s constituents were born outside the country. Ward 7, near the city’s northwest border, includes immigrant communities new and old: young Caribbean and South Asian families in highrise apartments near Jane and Finch, elderly Italians and other Europeans in modest postwar houses near Weston and Sheppard, Islington and Steeles and elsewhere.

The tomato gardens are immaculate. The convenience stores and hair salons and restaurants doing $4.99 jerk chicken lunch combos are visibly down at the heels. The ward’s average household income in 2010 was $62,541, 28 per cent below the city average of $87,038.

Mammoliti’s reign has been prolonged by the political disengagement — some say political alienation — typical of Toronto’s lower-income areas. It doesn’t take many votes to win Ward 7: Mammoliti prevailed with a mere 5,338 in the 2010 election. Turnout was 45 per cent, eighth-worst in the city.

Incumbency helps most in places where relatively few voters are paying attention. Mammoliti, who briefly ran for mayor in 2010 on a consciously outlandish platform, has a special talent for making himself the centre of attention at city hall. In his own ward, his name is still just as likely to draw a vacant stare as a visceral reaction — but his opponents’ names register with almost nobody.

Gord Hill, a warehouse manager in his 50s, said he hasn’t heard of any council candidate other than Mammoliti. He knows Mammoliti’s stance on Ford has changed over and over again, but he will still probably vote for him.

“Personally, I don’t think it matters who’s there, really, for the average Joe,” Hill said. He also doesn’t think Mammoliti is any crazier than anybody else. “Since Ford came in and went for mayor, I’ve been reading a lot of the politics. I really have never followed politics until then. They all say their little childish things.”

Seniors from Italy and other countries make up a significant percentage of Mammoliti’s base. Some of them get most or all of their news from upbeat foreign-language media outlets less critical of politicians than the big papers. Even on English-language broadcasts, Mammoliti, slick and intense, can sound as impressive to the casual viewer as he does ridiculous to his colleagues.

“I know I’ve read about him in the paper, I’ve watched him on TV numerous times on Channel 7 there, and I like that he’s a very serious, very serious-spoken person,” said Joseph Rizzo, 57. He said he “can’t recall” any Mammoliti controversies or scandals.

Mammoliti supporters are “individuals that solely get their information in the small blips that they see on TV,” said candidate Keegan Henry-Mathieu. “At the end of the day, Giorgio Mammoliti is really good at those 15-second moments.”

Mammoliti gets an extra boost from the Emery Village Business Improvement Area, with which he appears so tight that former councillor Howard Moscoe used to call it “the Mammoliti BIA.” A month into the election, the BIA newspaper ran a front-page article titled “Humble beginnings: A position of power, earned with humility and hard work, the story of Giorgio Mammoliti.”

There are signs that Mammoliti’s powerful grip on the ward is loosening. His margin of victory shrunk dramatically from 33 points in 2006 to 14 points in 2010. And a low-sample-size poll, taken in late July, put him in a statistical tie with Di Nizio.

Conditions appear ripe for an upset. Mammoliti is currently working without pay, stripped of his salary for three months over an improper mid-term fundraiser. He faces a December trial over allegedly exceeding the campaign spending limit in the last election. He was roundly condemned in June for calling Parkdale a “pedophile district,” then in August for blaming two drug-related deaths at a music festival on two councillors and the event’s organizer.

If he loses, though, interviews suggest little of this will have mattered. The fall of Giorgio Mammoliti, like his rise, will be about demographics — the Italian population is shrinking — and perceptions of his service to the people of his community.

Amarjit Gahlon, 42, said she opposes Mammoliti because he refused to make a meeting appointment with her husband and his fellow taxi drivers. Gary Bidgood, a senior on disability, railed about Mammoliti’s “stupid flower boxes” at the renovated Weston-Sheppard intersection, a visual obstruction to drivers. Rob Leva, a 48-year-old TTC supervisor, complained about the cost of watering the flowers in the boxes, the maple leaf design built into the middle of the intersection, and the quality of street paving and curb improvements.

“These are the little things that, I don’t know, they just give us a bad taste in our mouths with this guy,” he said. “And over the last four years, I haven’t seen him.”

Natascia Proietti, 41, a provincial civil servant, offered an unprompted endorsement of Di Nizio. She said Mammoliti’s alleged overspending “makes our neighbourhood look bad,” and she said she sees his behaviour “all over the news.” But as she tended to her lawn on a hot August afternoon, she was most upset about issues that will never make headlines.

“This community is really nice, but the amenities are very awful. He indicated that, at Sheppard and Weston, there was going to be a community, which was built, but he was also going to build a couple of stores and a grocery store. We’re still waiting for that,” Proietti said.

“What has he done for us? He built a Canadian flag, with interlocking brick, at Weston and Sheppard. So what? Why do we have a car wash when we need a gas station? We need a grocery store.”