OK, seems about 50 people voted here so far. Of those who did not vote for the community council, a majority of 55% said either "What's the council good for, anyway?" (29,6%) and/or "I don't know all these people" (25%).

While this is not representative, it seems likely. Not knowing what the council's good for... There's even a thread about this on the community mailing list right now. I couldn't really explain the role of the council if somebody asked.
Not knowing the candidates: While I come to both ITT and maemo.org almost daily to look for news, I only knew 4 out of 9 candidates well enough to make any decision right away. I didn't want to be unfair to the others, so I went to their profile pages on maemo.org, searched for their posts on ITT (if they had any), read their blogs/homepages/... to gather information and then compared it to those I knew.

So the bottom line could be:
If we want more people to vote, we need to better define what the council does and the candidates themselves should not be shy about "campaigning" (meaning: introducing themselves to the public). Nobody, even those with a high karma, can expect to be known.

My personal problem understanding the role of the council ATM is:
Council members are active community members. I see a lot of activity driven by council members. Still I can't tell if this is because they are members of the council, because the council as a body exists, or if it is because they're just devoted to Maemo and would have done what they did, anyway.

I could explain the role of the council better if I knew: This, this and this was done as a work of the council. It wouldn't have happened if the single members, even though each active and devoted, hadn't been organized in the structure they defined within the council.
Just an idea...