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Collection: What Democracy Looks Like

We Can’t Fix Anything Until We Fix Democracy

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Grab the issue you care most about—climate change, sustainable cities, a fair economy, or something else—sit it down, look it in the eye, and tell it there will be no Christmas this year. Or next year, or the next—we cannot fix important problems until we fix democracy.

[prettyquote align=right]”Remove #corruption from elections, and #democracy will become responsive to citizens.”[/prettyquote]

Climate change should be imminently solvable. We know which policies work. We have clean technologies, and people want to fix it. But none of that matters if government doesn’t represent the people. If government is implementing policies and propping up industries because they are lucrative for a small group of plutocrats, then no amount of public demand or technology solutions will help us solve climate change. Or any other issue that we care about.

We need a government that represents the people.

Professor Larry Lessig eloquently explains that the root of the problem, the fundamental corruption of US democracy, is elected officials’ dependence on the tiny number of wealthy funders who control elections. Remove corruption from elections, and democracy will become responsive to citizens.

But there is more than one root.

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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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Oregon’s Chance to Fix the Electoral College

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Thomas Jefferson believed that “[e]very constitution… naturally expires at the end of 19 years.” As “new discoveries are made, new truths disclosed… institutions must advance also, and keep pace with the times.” But Jefferson did not manage to insert a 20 year reset button into the US Constitution; instead, the nation ended up with the most difficult to amend or update Constitution in the entire world. The United States is number one!

The US Electoral College is a poster child for Jefferson’s fear that a constitution may linger beyond its natural life. When the Founding Fathers conceived of the Electoral College as “a small number” of “men most capable of analyzing” the “complicated” question of who should be president, there were fewer eligible voters in the whole country than there are now in just the city of Portland (there were only 2.5 million people in the whole country, and only a tiny fraction of those—white, wealthy, Protestant men—were allowed to vote). The Electoral College has always been a rubber stamp rather than the deliberative body the Founding Fathers imagined.

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Seattle Candidates, Meet Democracy Vouchers

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Would you run for office, if you didn’t have to raise big money from one percenters to do it? The Honest Elections Seattle Initiative is a pioneering local initiative that would provide a whole new path to office, a path through dozens of house parties and grassroots outreach, not posh downtown offices and hours of dialing for dollars. If it works in Seattle, it may spread to other places.

Last time, I described how the law’s innovative Democracy Vouchers work for you if you’re a voter. This time, I take a candidate’s eye view.

If you’re a Democracy Voucher candidate, here is what you do:

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Seattle Voters, Meet Democracy Vouchers

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Last time, I described the Honest Elections Seattle Initiative’s tough new rules for preventing corruption and giving ordinary voters a louder voice in local elections. This time, I begin to detail how Democracy Vouchers, the most innovative part of the initiative, work by explaining them from a voter’s perspective. Next time, I’ll do the same from a candidate’s perspective.

Democracy Vouchers are simplicity itself for voters. In January of a municipal election year, if you’re registered to vote in Seattle, you’ll get an envelope in the mail from the Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission (SEEC). It may look like the ballot envelopes you’re used to getting from King County Elections. Inside will be an instruction sheet and four $25 Democracy Vouchers with your name on them.

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Introducing: The Honest Elections Seattle Initiative

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A coalition last week filed citizens’ Initiative 122 in Seattle that assembles into a single package some of the toughest corruption prevention and clean-election laws found anywhere in the United States. It also adds one startlingly original feature: a campaign funding system called Democracy Vouchers, which gives every voter $100 of coupons to hand over to the candidates of their choice. The idea is so simple and revolutionary it might just start changing politics across Cascadia and beyond. If the coalition can gather about 30,000 signatures, which seems likely, the measure will appear on ballots in November. It stands a good chance of passing.

What’s in the initiative?

Honest Elections Seattle closes the revolving door: City elected officials and their top aides may not lobby their former colleagues for three years after leaving office.

Honest Elections Seattle tightens the cap on big money, lowering the limits per contributor down to $500. That’s among the lowest limits in the United States.

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Voter Suppression is Exorbitantly Expensive

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There is a war going on, and Oregon is ground zero. Some states, mostly in the South and Midwest, are restricting voter rights through Voter ID laws and barriers to voter registration. But the Pacific Northwest is defending rights. In a democracy, honoring every citizen’s vote is the right thing to do. Oregon proves it is also the cost-conscious thing to do.

Oregon is a national leader in striking down the barriers to voting: the Beaver State enables citizens to register online, mails ballots to all registered voters, and now will digitally transfer eligible voters’ information from the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) to the voter rolls. But even in Oregon, every single Republican and one Democrat voted against the new motor voter law. House Republican Leader Carl Wilson of Grants Pass explained that the law would “cost a broke county $7,800 in the first year. That is money we don’t have.” Never mind that the cost of honoring Josephine County’s citizens’ right to vote adds an infinitesimal 0.009 percent to the county’s $84 million budget.

If this war were really about how much money states and counties spend on voting, voting rights would be winning across the country. For all its efforts to empower voters, Oregon gets a real bargain on elections. Other states could too.

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

Honoring citizens’ right to vote by running the state and county administrations that register voters; keeping the voter rolls updated and accurate; distributing, collecting, and tallying ballots—add up the costs of all those activities and divide by the number of registered voters in Oregon, and it comes to less than $2 per registered voter per election.

Other states average around $10 per registered voter per election.

By erecting or maintaining barriers to voting, other states pay five times as much as Oregon.

Why are Oregon’s costs so much lower than the national average?

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