Takeaways
- Voters’ Guides, official pamphlets of election information, are commonplace and thorough in coastal Cascadia but sparse in the northern Rockies—and British Columbia.
- Voters’ Guides for all would upgrade democracy everywhere.
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Consider the humble Voters’ Guide: an official booklet that lets candidates and campaigns state their cases. Those of us who live in Voters’ Guide states take them for granted, filling in our ballots with the pamphlet open beside us, indispensable companions. An easy way to upgrade democracy would be to replicate Voters’ Guides across Cascadia and beyond. Such pamphlets are ubiquitous in coastal Cascadia (with one exception—more on that below) but rare inland.
We Cascadians in Oregon and Washington—we who have voted by mail for so long that going to a polling place is mostly just a story told by elders—take such guides for granted. They arrive from elections offices shortly before our ballots do, lining mailboxes with comforting newsprint pages filled with headshots, candidate pitches, and arguments for and against ballot measures. They also compile other useful information, such as deadlines, locations, schedules, and services for those with disabilities or language barriers. Many localities offer guides in languages other than English, and Washington’s state nonpartisan TV station even produces a video version.
The same goes for Cascadians who live on the southern periphery of the region on California’s redwood coast: voters’ guides are a given. Just so, Cascadians in the region’s northernmost reaches benefit from Alaska’s Official Election Pamphlet, which describes ballot issues and provides candidate statements.
The singularity of this practice is easy to forget. On TikTok, one newcomer to Washington from Oklahoma expressed bewildered delight at the discovery, “They mail you a pamphlet . . . with everyone’s stances on everything so you don’t have to do research?!?! That’s not true! That can’t be true!” Oh yes, it is.
Away from the Pacific, and long before you get to Oklahoma, though, voters’ guides thin out. Idaho and Montana’s Voter Information Pamphlets exclude candidate races entirely, though they do provide pro and con arguments for state ballot measures (an example). Wyoming’s official voters’ guides don’t even do that. They exclude candidate statements, pro/con statements, and even the text of the measures.
What explains this pattern? Is it just a blue-red split, with coastal blues happier to pay to inform voters while Rocky Mountain reds save their money? Maybe, but red-state Alaska doesn’t fit that pattern. It votes conservative but mails a comprehensive voters’ guide to every home in the state, like its coastal cousins to the south. And brick-red Utah, cozied up beside Idaho and Wyoming, publishes a comprehensive voters’ pamphlet, though it distributes it mostly online rather than through the mail.
The difference is likely just a fluke of history. That’s why it’s heartening that Idaho’s conservative Secretary of State has repeatedly sponsored legislation for a comprehensive voters’ guide in the Gem State. Let’s hope the state legislature stops demurring and approves the plan.
P.S. The exception
Oh, then there’s the big outlier, the coastal exception which I referred to above: the province of British Columbia. ElectionsBC publishes no voters’ pamphlet at all. No candidate information. Nothing on ballot measures. Only generic information on the mechanics of voting.
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Is British Columbia, famously the most liberal jurisdiction in Cascadia, a Wyoming-like conservative about paying to inform voters? Not really.
The province’s entire election system is so completely different than that in the US parts of Cascadia that voters’ pamphlets are less needed. In the province’s high-stakes October 19 election, voters’ ballots will offer only one single race: the choice of a local representative to the legislative assembly in Victoria. While US Cascadian voters fill in a dozen or more bubbles for different national, state, and local races, British Columbians will fill in just one. In practice, they’ll vote for whichever party they want to govern the province.
Canadian national elections, when they come, are much the same: voters cast a ballot only for a single member of parliament. In local elections, voters may cast ballots on two or three races, for mayor, city council, or school board, for example. But the number of decisions BC voters face is a slim fraction of the number other Cascadian voters do.
A voters’ pamphlet wouldn’t be wasted on the province, in other words, but it might not be as much of a godsend as it already is in the rest of coastal Cascadia or as it would be for the voters of the northern Rockies, who navigate long ballots without a guide.
Thanks to Sightline Fellow Todd Newman for research.
