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Collection: Honest Elections Seattle

All articles from this series are 2016 and earlier
https://www.sightline.org/series/honest-elections-seattle/

The Seattle Times’ Four Critiques of Honest Elections Seattle…

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The Seattle Times recently editorialized against I-122 Honest Elections Seattle. Its arguments include a litany of errors. To set the record straight, I’ll repost and correct each of the editorial board’s four points.

The Times writes:

The proposal counts on people not participating. . . . Only about . . . 13 percent . . . of the vouchers could be redeemed before the money runs out. While the initiative suggests all voters should have a chance to contribute to campaigns — using taxpayer dollars — it assumes only a small percentage of voters would actually bother to do so, even when the money doesn’t come out of their own pockets. More money, more apathy.

The truth is that Honest Elections Seattle projects and counts on more people giving to local campaigns than ever seen in Seattle or anywhere else in the United States. I-122 gives Democracy Vouchers to every registered voter in the city, giving them a chance to have a voice in local politics as never before. In my dreams, everyone would treasure and use those vouchers. In reality, most people will not. Vouchers start from a baseline of political giving that could hardly be lower: In Seattle’s 2013 elections only 1.5 percent of city adults made campaign contributions.

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Honest Elections Seattle Tames Lobbying Money

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In 2013, during the last municipal election campaigns in Seattle, the ridesharing company Lyft was fighting for its life in a dispute over local taxi regulations. It contributed $2,600 to candidates for mayor and city council and also spent $15,000 lobbying city hall. Eventually, it won city rules agreeable to its interests.

Meanwhile, Clise Properties, a developer involved in an enormous set of construction projects north of downtown Seattle for which it sought city permission to take over alleys and install a new district energy system, spent $48,000 lobbying city officials that year. It also contributed $2,800 to candidates for city office. It has since won permission for many of its projects.

The Rental Housing Association (RHA), which represents landlords in city hall in policy fights over apartment regulations, tenant protections, and land-use ordinances, spent $30,000 on city lobbying in 2013 and $2,600 on campaign contributions.

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Video: Who Funds Seattle’s Political Candidates?

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Ever wondered who funds Seattle’s political candidates? Well, Sightline has—so we mapped it. For your convenience and viewing pleasure, we condensed the report into a two minute video that paints a picture of Seattle’s money in politics.

To win elections, local candidates depend on a tiny share of the people who live in Seattle: mostly, rich, white people in view homes. Honest Elections Seattle (Initiative 122) would lower the limit on contributions to candidates and let every voter contribute $100 of public campaign vouchers to the candidate of his or her choice. Now that’s what a true participatory democracy looks like.

[sightline-embed]

View the full report here.

View the interactive map here.

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Interactive Map: Who Funds Seattle’s Political Candidates?

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Did you miss Sightline Institute’s new report released yesterday? Or didn’t have time to read all 27 pages? Don’t fret—here’s your political funding cheat sheet. Simply click the image below and explore the tabs to see how Seattle’s largest political contributions overlap with the wealthiest and whitest neighborhoods with view homes. The alarmingly small number of contributors that dominate Seattle’s political game demonstrates the need for democracy reform.

What would political contributions look like if Honest Elections Seattle (Initiative 122) is enacted in November? Don’t forget to click the last tab to find out.

Who Funds Seattle’s Political Candidates?

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Overwhelmingly, rich, white people who live in Seattle’s waterfront and view homes fund Seattle’s political candidates. That’s the picture that emerges from a new Sightline Institute study released today. If enacted by voters in November, Honest Elections Seattle (Initiative 122) could spread the funding of campaigns from elite neighborhoods to the whole city.

The report analyzes the pattern of political contributions in the 2013 city elections to explore how Honest Elections Seattle might affect giving. The city’s most-giving neighborhoods (dubbed “Big Money Zones”) hold just 4 percent of the population, but they gave as much political money as the least-giving neighborhoods that house 64 percent of the city. Per person, the Big Money Zones gave more than 18 times as much as the least-giving ones.

How the Big Apple Boosted Small Donors

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In the Northwest, as across the United States, political giving is an elite affair, heavily concentrated among one percenters and residents of affluent, white neighborhoods. Even in Seattle, which has more campaign participation than most places, only 1.7 percent of adults made a contribution to any local candidate in the last municipal election, in 2013. Half of those people made contributions, to all candidates combined, of $100 or less.

Vouchers could be a huge boost for participatory democracy.
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Honest Elections Seattle’s Democracy Voucher program could change all that, though, multiplying the number of residents who give to campaigns and expanding the geography of contributors to the whole city. Vouchers could be a huge boost for participatory democracy. Another day, I’ll lay out the specific case of Seattle, complete with maps and statistics. Today, I describe how public funding has transformed campaign giving in New York City. In the Big Apple, candidates for state assembly and city council run in districts of similar size and in similarly competitive races. Candidates for state assembly raise money the old-fashioned way: dialing for dollars. Candidates for city council, in contrast, raise money through a system of public-matching funds for small-dollar contributions. The first $175 of any resident’s gift is matched six-to-one with public funds. This one difference makes New York a fascinating natural experiment in how public campaign funds change politics.

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Honest Elections Seattle Is Legal

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I’ve explained how Honest Elections Seattle works (for voters, candidates, and election officials) and that it’s fraud-repellent and cheap. This time, I just want to assure you that it’s legal, SCOTUS notwithstanding.

People question me, all the time, about the constitutionality of limiting big money in US politics, because since Citizens United, everyone on the continent seems to know that the Supreme Court has declared money a protected form of free speech. Almost everyone—left, right, and center—hates this idea and with it, the way private interests have corrupted Washington, DC: 96 percent of Americans believe that US democracy is far too influenced by big money. Unfortunately, 91 percent of Americans also think there’s nothing anyone can do about it.

That’s where people are mistaken.

We can do a lot about it, and the Supreme Court itself has drawn a path. SCOTUS says “thou shalt not ban private money” except in narrowly defined circumstances (basically, to prevent cash-for-votes corruption), but diluting private money with public money? That’s allowed.

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Charts: Honest Elections Seattle is an Incredible Bargain

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Honest Elections Seattle, the citizens’ initiative to hold elected officials accountable and give ordinary voters a stronger voice in local elections, is financed by a special property tax levy of $3 million per year.

To you or me, that may sound like a lot of money.

For a city like Seattle, though, it’s “budget dust,” in the words of Bill Finkbeiner, former Republican leader of the Washington State Senate.

Seattle’s 2015 budget is $4.8 billion. Honest Elections Seattle will increase that by 0.062 percent. On this bar chart, you need a magnifying glass to see the increment of dust.

Original Sightline Institute graphic, available under our free use policy.
Original Sightline Institute graphic, available under our free use policy.

What else costs $3 million in the Seattle budget?

  • Two months of operations at the Police Department’s South Precinct
  • A year’s worth of landscaping and tree maintenance  (see Urban Forestry)
  • One week of work on the city’s share of viaduct and seawall replacement (see Major Projects)

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Democracy Vouchers Are Fraud-Repellent

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At almost every talk I give about Honest Elections Seattle’s Democracy Vouchers, a subset of the audience quickly convinces itself that fraud, forgery, abuse, and gaming will run rampant. They imagine campaigns or astroturf organizers or straight-up hoodlums roaming the neighborhoods, buying vouchers for $5 apiece. Or they imagine apartment managers raiding mailboxes, extracting vouchers and submitting them. Or they imagine forgers or hackers flooding the Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission with flotillas of bogus campaign coupons.

It’s not a baseless fear: where money and politics are concerned, cynicism is understandable. Fortunately, in this case, it is not justified. Voucher shenanigans are likely to be rare; cheating is going to be a modest, even trivial, problem, for three reasons.

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Seattle Government, Meet Democracy Vouchers

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The board game Monopoly is simple enough for most nine-year-olds to master quickly. The rules of the game, however, run to eight pages, and you’d never hand them to your third grader and expect her to grasp how the play unfolds. It’s better to sit her down with some friends and walk through the steps, referring to the rules when questions arise.

Similarly, despite many people’s perception that Honest Elections Seattle’s system of Democracy Vouchers is complicated, it is actually simplicity itself, even if the official text of Initiative 122  approaches 9,000 words. The best way to understand it is to walk through the steps of the game, not to read the rulebook. I’ve already walked through Honest Elections Seattle from the perspectives of voters and candidates. In this article, I do the same from the perspective of the Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission (SEEC), which will implement the law if voters approve it in November. First, though, some context.

Democracy Vouchers Are Simple

Democracy Vouchers, like Monopoly, seem complicated only if you’re trying to understand them by reading the rules. In practice, they are a surprisingly simple program, much simpler than most public programs that big cities administer.

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